


Always a Bridesmaid

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Doctors & Physicians, Engagement, F/M, Gen, Humor, Romance, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-06-06 22:44:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6773302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern AU You are cordially invited to the wedding of Emma Charlotte Green and Henry Christopher Hopkins. If you are Mary Phinney, consider yourself invited-- and warned. If you are Jed Foster, start making a Plan B.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hair and Make-up

**We hav to elope** Mary texted Jed, managing to shove the hairstylist’s voluminous leopard print cape off to one side so she could see the phone. 

She hated the frequent typos she made and the lack of punctuation, but she knew he would get the point. It was only 10 am and she had clearly erred with the decaf chai latte she thought would help establish a zen frame of mind. She and Jed had flown into Dulles yesterday but had split up after the rehearsal dinner as directed by Emma’s mother; this was ostensibly intended to foster some sort of bridesmaid bonding via sharing a hotel room for forty-eight hours. She was rooming with Aurelia, Emma’s college roommate, who thank God neither snored nor had any other objectionable habits. She hadn’t been surprised to find she had a wicked sense of humor since she had chosen to live with Emma for four years, but so far, Aurelia was the only win of the wedding weekend. The kicker was that Mary couldn’t confide in her best friend, since the bride was across the room with two separate stylists working on her but also because Mary would never complain about anything at this wedding. Emma had worked so hard to try and make everything perfect but also comfortable in the midst of covering for another fellow on maternity leave. The last thing she needed was a cranky comment from a cranky Mary, who was, quite frankly, not comfortable at all. 

So far, Mary had attended a militantly festive bridal breakfast with pink champagne and sturgeon caviar to honor the bridal colors. This might have actually been quite nice if it hadn’t started at 6:30 am on the dot. She’d been drilled on the day’s schedule by Mrs. Green, tasked with getting a shiny new sixpence secured in Emma’s shoe, had her bridesmaid dress in its shroud-like garment bag examined by Emma’s Aunt Faye, and been texted a list of emergency numbers for the florist, organist, event coordinator and officiant as Mrs. Green had approximately zero confidence in Alice, Emma’s nineteen year old sister and maid-of-honor, should anything take out the mother of the bride. Like an asteroid or say, Mary’s fist during an “uncontrolled” myoclonic jerk. Across the salon, she could hear the running burble of Alice’s argument with her mother and Emma’s conciliatory tones, like a fire extinguisher aimed at a river of lava. Christ, she would kill for a real cup of coffee.

Mary stretched out her legs under the cape and regarded her pedicure as if it were her meditation focal point. She’d stuck with boring old fire engine red which was basically a neutral for pedicures but it was quasi-appropriate when she chose to wear open-toed shoes to her outpatient clinic hours; she never did at the hospital because the gross factor was too high. She preferred to do them herself, usually with Emma on speaker-phone if she couldn’t actually make it over, but she had been strapped for time, so she’d swallowed her first world guilt and gave the beautiful Asian woman in the salon a huge tip and was done in twenty minutes after work before they had to finish packing. She had let Jed try to help her once, but had learned that while he gave an excellent foot and leg massage—oh, those clever hands, slick with cocoa butter!-- he couldn’t paint a toenail for crap and the whole apartment stank of the acetone she had to resort to when the non-acetone paint remover was an utter failure at getting OPI Spare Me a French Quarter out of the sisal rug. They had spent a frustrating half hour arguing over whether or not to just throw the rug out, which she insisted was wasteful, before he gave up and let her pick the next Netflix show as an apology (she’d picked “Lark Rise to Candleford” but the joke was on her because she fell asleep after twenty minutes and awoke to find Jed totally engrossed and insisting on finishing the whole first season that weekend.) The acetone seemed to have been pretty effective on the sisal, though she couldn’t help but wonder whether he had just replaced the rug and not told her. It would be like him to reverse-Gaslight her with a gift. 

Jed’s gift giving was something they had argued about as well. He insisted that it was one of his preferred “Love Languages” and she needed to accept it. She was ambivalent; it went against her upbringing and her better self to reject a present (always carefully chosen and on point as he was also apparently a gift-giving savant) but she felt the inequality of it as her ability to reciprocate was limited by both her medical fellow’s income and the frugality her mother had nurtured in her. Jed had been brought up in a wealthy family and had a very different perspective on money than she did. She knew they would need to deal with it and had even wondered whether they should go to some pre-emptive marital counseling. She’d tried explaining once that his abundant generosity could make her feel mean and grasping, unimaginative, unable to match his grand gestures like the tickets to the ballet he’d produced on her birthday or the lavender cashmere bathrobe she would never have bought for herself, but which she loved to wear all day when they managed to have a weekend with neither one of them on-call. They’d had a blow-up about it a few weeks ago when he had mentioned replacing her year-old laptop and he’d dialed it back, even buying everything store-brand until she asked him to go back to getting the real Cheerios and Heinz ketchup. 

Still, she knew they hadn’t resolved the issue. She wondered whether she should offer to sign a pre-nup. God knew she had no designs on his trust fund or inheritance, but she thought their financial situation (her loans from college were nearly paid off but she owed the federal government the equivalent of a 5 bedroom Tudor in a nice Cleveland suburb for med school) were disparate enough that they might consider keeping all expenses and financial obligations separate. She suspected he would see it as a rejection though, which was the last thing she intended. And she couldn’t imagine how complicated it would get after they had children, a subject they fortunately agreed upon in every way (two with the option for a third, no nannies, and not until she finished fellowship and was an attending, please God, let her remaining eggs last that long.)

 _What’s going on, Dr. P? I miss u_ Jed texted back. She doggedly stuck to writing texts that were as close to an email as she could get, with capitalization and grammar and punctuation, but Jed’s texts were always an unpredictable amalgam of abbreviations, proper English, trending GIFs, emojis and slang he insisted it would be ok for him to use when she raised an eyebrow and pointed out he was A) a nearly thirty-five year old MD/PhD and B) not a former, current or honorary member of any boy band, US or UK. Still, his texts were always entertaining and he had some weird psychic power of knowing exactly how much real affection she required at any given time, so sincere I love yous, the you never abbreviated into a u, the love always spelled and never a heart, appeared on her phone at perfectly timed intervals. 

**This whole thing is just bizarre, like total throw-back. Emma’s mother is sittng under a dryer with her hair in these enormous curlers, very politely reading her sister the riot act over God knows what. There are two separate stylists working on Emma. I’m hoping they forget I’m here. I miss you too, J** she wrote back. She knew she had set herself up to be teased for her paragraph-long text, but she didn’t care. The other major downside of this weekend was being separated from Jed for so long. Their schedules were only intermittently in sync and to have time away from the hospital and not have the freedom to use it how she wanted was infuriating, even if it was for a good cause. As a bridesmaid, she had expected an itinerary of sorts, but Emma had looked truly abashed after they’d hugged hello and Mrs. Green, exquisitely coifed and in Lilly Pulitzer from head-to-toe, had handed Mary a color-coded binder with the weekend’s events and her responsibilities. Emma had mouthed “I’m sorry” and Mary had thought that fellowship orientation at Boston Children’s— with the new biological terrorism protocol reviewed for a solid hour-- had been more relaxed. Jed had burst out laughing when he saw the binder and then pointed out it had been kind of Mrs. Green to personalize it with Mary’s monogram. She had scowled and he’d passed her a tiny bottle of Coke from the mini-bar in his hotel room as a compensation, but then he’d drawn her head down onto his chest and started stroking her hair while the TV droned one of the fishing shows he liked and she dozed off for a half-hour to the metronome of his heartbeat. The Coke had probably left an equally tiny water ring on the bedside table, she supposed.

 **Did you sleep in? I wished I could have after last night. But I did like dancing with you.** Mary texted back. The rehearsal dinner had been something else—more of a roast of poor Henry than anything else, though Emma’s cousins got some digs in, especially harping on her high school boyfriend Frank who had evidently been more into Dungeons  & Dragons than Emma and who had stood her up for her junior prom. Henry Hopkins was one of the most genuinely nice human beings Mary knew and his work as the director of religious life and education at a Quaker prep school didn’t yield rich material for a roast, so his brothers were basically airing all his dirty laundry from his adolescence. The speeches had seemed interminable and Mary couldn’t help but hope that the meal at the actual wedding was a little more inspired than the limp chicken cordon bleu but at least she had gotten to sit next to Jed, who looked completely dashing in his blazer and linen pants, “my country club uniform,” he called it. He had almost worn an extremely loud bow-tie spangled with psychedelic Mickey Mouses before Mary intervened and they’d compromised on a forest green silk patterned with tiny silver cadeuces (since he had purposely packed both, she realized he’d planned the entire argument to tease her.) She’d noted it could pass for a Slytherin House uniform tie and he’d said, “It’s such a good thing you work with children” before giving her a great, smacking kiss and whispering in her ear, “You know I’m a Ravenclaw, you little witch.” She’d winked at him then and twirled, since she was the one in Ravenclaw blue, her vintage fifties cocktail dress an indigo taffeta, the skirt full and the back bare. The long ribbons of the sash tickled her calves and Jed whistled appreciatively as she walked by in the three inch heels she’d had dyed to match.

Fortunately, Henry’s parents had at least sprung for a decent band and the venue had a reasonably sized dance floor. Mary knew she wasn’t an especially good dancer, but she loved dancing and she loved dancing with Jed. He was an especially good dancer with a fantastic sense of rhythm and an instinctive feel for nearly every ballroom dance. He attributed this to “the years of cotillion my mother forced me to go to” but Mary didn’t care why or how, she didn’t care how bored and nervous he might have been as a scrawny eleven year old boy, because when he held her in his arms during a waltz she felt like she was floating and when the band played a rhumba, she felt like they were one step away from having sex on the dance floor. Really, really good sex. They’d danced for hours under the approving gaze of Emma’s grandparents and the other older relatives who preferred the slower tempo; most of the younger guests had drifted out to the veranda that overlooked a formal garden. As it grew darker, the fireflies flickered out and only the glow of cigarettes and a few joints glimmered. Mary thought they’d maybe missed out on having a leisurely chat with Aurelia or Emma’s brother Jimmy, who Mary had found was much more open talking about his political consulting work in a smaller setting, but she couldn’t regret the hours spent in Jed’s arms. The vetiver smell of his cologne mingled with the bergamot and clove of the Mitsouko she saved for special occasions and she luxuriated in the delicious rasp of his beard against her throat and his voice whispering to her-- sometimes the song’s lyrics, sometimes nearly debauched propositions that she sadly knew were out of reach, at least for the next few nights. 

_I tried but I couldn’t Missed u 2 much. Woke up early, found a café, worked on my case report_ he texted back. Mary smiled to herself. Jed liked to present himself as laid-back and insouciant much of the time, but she knew how diligent he really was. Diligent and sometimes obsessive—she’d found cartons of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey melting on the kitchen counter when he’d gotten distracted by the latest issue of Brain or the New England Journal instead of unloading the groceries. It was one of the things that she loved about him—how much he truly cared about medicine, his patients, the latest research. She envied him the uninterrupted morning spent with work and a good cup of coffee.

Just then, Aurelia came into the salon, bearing a cardboard coffee cup holder full of what appeared to be iced coffee, condensation beading the cups’ sides, ice cubes making a lovely little clink. She had a brown paper bag in her other hand and Mary suspected it was full of those tiny plastic creamer cups and sugar packets, with enough stirring sticks for a third grader to build a respectable bridge. Aurelia stopped over by Emma first who smiled but waved her off as the two stylists continued fluttering around her like moths, really big moths with curling irons and hairspray canisters. Mary hoped and her hope was rewarded when Aurelia came to her next. **Aurelia is my new best friend. You’re demoted. She just brought iced coffee.**

“I thought you looked like you regretted your morning beverage choice when I saw you walking out of the hotel so I picked these up at a café down the street. You want one?” Aurelia offered. She was comfortably dressed in a blue button-down and jeans even though there was little risk of her destroying her hair or make-up when she changed clothes later. She had a short haircut, “kind of my take on Lupita Nyong’o’s faux-hawk,” and only needed her make-up done at the salon. Well, she didn’t even need that—she was gorgeous without any make-up at all, Mary thought—but she’d evidently agreed to it in solidarity with Emma.

“Oh my God. You are my savior. Nirvana. Mmm,” Mary said, sucking down the cold coffee through a straw, waiting for the electric hum to hit her, the euphoric charge she wouldn’t need to direct towards a docket of twelve discharges and fourteen new admissions. The coffee was good—probably small-batch, freshly roasted, not the acrid Dunkin brew that was ubiquitous in Boston. She awkwardly reached over the put the cup down next to her and Aurelia gestured to her left hand where her engagement ring was.

“That’s beautiful—you like vintage stuff then? I saw your dress last night and the butterfly pin. They’re in beautiful condition—fifties, right? Or maybe late forties, New Look? I couldn’t quite tell.” Aurelia had a good eye, but it wasn’t surprising. She worked as a high school art teacher but she was an artist herself. Emma had some of Aurelia’s wood block prints framed in her apartment and Mary could tell they were seriously good. 

“Yeah, I love the older stuff and if you look hard enough, you can find great pieces, one-of-a-kind stuff and for not too much. Student loans, y’know? That dress was actually my Grandma Lou’s, she got it in forty-nine, I think—I’m lucky we were about the same size, I just had to have it hemmed a little and professionally cleaned. I got the pin on Ebay,” Mary replied.

“But not that ring—that’s gorgeous. When’s it from?” Aurelia asked, her tone curious but not prying. Mary appreciated Aurelia was asking her a question that was generally accepted as a favorite for an engaged woman. It wasn’t for Mary, but that was her own hang-up.

“No, that’s older. Edwardian, I think. It was my fiance’s great-grandmother’s.” The ring Jed had offered her was lovely—platinum with a delicate bezel setting and floral designs with sapphires bracketing an impressive cushion-cut diamond. He had seen her about to say “Yes, but…” to his proposal, the yes to the marriage, the but to the ring when he interrupted, “It was my great-grandmother’s, it’s a family ring—I don’t think it’s a blood diamond!” So, she had laughed and agreed and fallen into his arms and worn nothing but the ring for the next twenty-four hours until they weakly ventured out for eggs Benedict, exhausted from hours of love-making and talking, unable to stop smiling. 

“His name is Jesse? No, that’s wrong, isn’t it—it’s Jed, right? He sat next to you last night at the rehearsal dinner—man, he’s only got eyes for you. How’d you meet?” Aurelia had settled herself into the next salon chair. They were in some sort of no-man’s land and the stylists were clustered across the room, working on Emma and her mother, her younger sister Alice, and Emma’s cousin Anne. Mary swallowed another sustaining glug of the coffee before she resumed talking. Her phone pinged softly with Jed’s latest text _Henry invited me 2 golf I get 2 drive the cart C u @ lunch???_

“Well, we met at a pediatric fellowship mixer at Boston Children’s. Emma and I met at Children’s too, but earlier—we were at a women-in-medicine event before orientation ended. I met Jed the year after, at the mixer,” she said. She smiled, remembering. The administration decided it would be good for morale to have this huge event in July, right after all the new residents and fellows started, inviting all the general pediatric residents and specialty fellows to the one big ‘do instead of all the smaller, feudal barbecues held in Brookline and Newton at the attendings’ aspirational homes-- big windows open onto malachite green yards, white Carrera kitchen counters with aluminum buckets of Perrier and craft beers, the family room always liberally strewn with the sharpest Legos in the world and a half-chewed board book wedged in the cushions of a mid-range suede sectional. 

Instead, there’d been a ballroom at a mid-range hotel and put out a big buffet with mediocre salads and soft drinks, cheap wine and beer served in brittle plastic cups. She’d been milling around, wishing Emma was already there, and staked out a spot not far from the cheese platter. It wasn’t great cheese, but it had less chance of giving her food poisoning and was popular enough that she didn’t seem entirely standoffish. Jed had come over to put together a plate, some cheese and crackers haphazardly piled on, one lone strawberry like a concession to healthy eating. She remembered thinking, “Is this guy for real?” before he even opened his mouth to speak; he was wearing a white button down with the sleeves rolled up and a bow-tie, like the pediatric attendings she remembered from medical school, the old guys who used the bow-tie as some sort of secret society sign that they were fun and liked kids. Jed’s bow-tie had been pink, with little blue figures on it, maybe dolphins or whales, and she wondered what message the sea-creatures were supposed to convey. He’d worn a belt of the same material, the brass buckle dully gold. She suspected his socks had been pink too.

“Hi, there, I’m Jed Foster, pedi neuro, sort of third year—I’m doing research and it messes with the timing. This is an improvement over last year, right?—when they had the cafeteria cater?” he said. She’d been pleasantly surprised that he wasn’t a complete jerk, had extended the plate of messy cheese toward her twice, and made real eye contact. He had beautiful eyes, very dark and very bright, and she found herself noticing a variety of inconsequential details about him as attractive—his closely trimmed beard, the bones of his wrists, the way he kicked lightly at the floor with one loafered foot. The whole time she was listening to him and his virtual Grand Rounds on the wonders and appeal of pediatric neurology, why he had chosen it, how he found the fellowship, his favorite journal articles. It should have been boring, but he was so delighted with his work and so goddamn smart, she was completely interested, even as she noted he was barely taking a breath. “I mean, it’s the brain but it’s still totally plastic! Like, what’s happening when they take out half a hemisphere for intractable seizures and the rest of it just, just takes over all the tasks? Come on, what’s better than that? Those cards guys, they are always so hyped and self-important and I want to say, yay for you, it’s a fancy pump. I’m trying to figure out the most complex supercomputer on Earth! Wait, I’m being so rude, I apologize—you’re just starting your peds internship, right? Do you want to specialize?” He’d smiled encouragingly. She’d smiled back, a little wry but mostly bemused at his estimate of her age; she felt the glow of being carded again.

“I’m pedi heme-onc, first year fellow. I was one of the chiefs here last year. No research though, so no complications,” she replied. He kept his mouth shut during her quasi-bombshell, she gave him points for that.

“Oh, cancer. Well. Yes. That’s good too,” he said, trying like hell to figure out how to extricate himself from his morass of assumptions. Jed peered at her more carefully, offering an abashed smile. 

“I’m sorry, I just assumed—you look so young, but really, what a jerk move,” he screwed up his face and she admitted to herself he was adorable, “Was that a micro-aggression? I think it was, I’m sorry—I really want to be better than that, but basically, I’m pretty much a total asshole—entitled WASPy guy who doesn’t realize his degree of entitlement—so you’re really going to need to just tell me when I screw up like that, okay—no wait, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?—I mean, when you think I’m being an asshole, please, tell me. Mary.” Jed said, suddenly earnest and she knew that somehow, they’d just become friends. She happily waved Emma over when she arrived forty-five minutes later. Mary was flushed and gesturing with a celery stick, explaining why she still liked This Old House the best, even though there were so many other flashier home shows on HGTV now, and Jed was nodding and laughing at everything she said. Then he asked her to go out to dinner, a real date, not the vague “drinks” scenario that she was so tired of. She still remembered the feeling she’d had when he’d asked, clearly unsure she would say yes, but waiting and hoping she would clear as day in his eyes and she knew she wanted to. Wanted to say yes. Wanted to have dinner with him. Wanted whatever came after.

“It’s not a very interesting story, I guess—just two nerdy doctors and lots of take-out and bad coffee, but it works, y’know?” Mary said after a pause, realizing she’d kind of spaced out and that Aurelia very politely had overlooked it, was peering at her nails and swinging one sandaled foot to the thump of the latest Top 10 pop earworm the salon had started playing “to keep it fun, ladies!” 

“Hey, Mary— you’re up. For the hair, you have to decide what he’s going to do with your hair,” Aurelia said, grabbing her own phone and scrolling through her texts, before starting to make some calls. “He” was standing in front of her, a twenty-something stylist who did look a little relieved to have vacated the Green section of the salon. To the stylist, hip with a nose-ring and a sleeve of tats, vaguely Maori-inspired but likely sourced from Lord of the Rings, Mary said, “I think an updo, pretty classic and simple, with a lot of spray to hold it. Like, all the spray you have. I brought a little rhinestone pin to put in it, too, if you can find a way to make sure it won’t go anywhere.” The stylist, who’d introduced himself as Evander, assured Mary he could deal with all that “and make it look romantic too, not too Grace Kelly for you—you need a little more Hedy Lamar going on, you know, soft and sexy, but with that smart brunette vibe.” Mary was just pleased Evander knew who Grace Kelly was—the Hedy Lamar allusion was a total astonishment, the promise that random Wikipedia searches actually could increase a person’s knowledge base. 

Evander was working quickly, skillfully, his hands tugging and arranging—she was being lulled into a meditative state with the virtual acupressure massage. Aurelia was talking rapidly into her phone but Mary’s couldn’t make out the words clearly—it sounded like Portugese, like Spanish gussied up some French, all those soft, sexy z’s. She thought more about what had come after that first date with Jed—they’d gone to a Thai place and she was relieved when he didn’t press her to order bubble tea. What had come after that was a lot of dinners and Netflix and a healthy dose of bourgeois New England dating—farmer’s markets where they bought lumpy organic vegetables that didn’t go with the rest of the meal, and bookstores on Newbury St., and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where a guard yelled at Mary and Mary looked murderously back at the guard and then Jed walked her to the shadowy colonnade overlooking the courtyard full of bellflowers and kissed her so gently and for so long, she gasped “I love you!” before she could stop herself. Then he kissed her again, once, deeply, holding her face with both hands, and said, “I don’t want to say it here—I want to say it to you when we are somewhere I can keep saying it, somewhere that’s just ours-- where we’ll both know that’s where I told you,” and then he took her hand and they ran down the hallway while parents told their children to behave, in voices snapping like violin strings too abruptly tightened.

What had come after was Jed telling her about his marriage and divorce—the three years during med school he had spent with Eliza “I wish I could say it was complicated, but it wasn’t. We both wanted the kit--to get married and we liked each other and the sex was good so we thought it would work. And it didn’t.” And Mary telling Jed about her father’s death, a massive MI after shoveling heavy, wet, heart attack snow and how she had been prepared to take a leave of absence from Emerson right after her transfer from UMass but her mother told her not to and her sister Caroline agreed. Jed explained how he was thirteen years clean, had gone to an expensive private rehab in Arizona after his junior year of college to deal with the cocaine that wasn’t a joke anymore. He’d said he’d never risk using anything now, there was too much to lose so he could live with pasta without Chianti and virgin pina coladas. Mary had admitted she was worried she’d be unable to conceive after losing an ovary and tube to an ectopic while she was skiing in Germany with her then-boyfriend Gustav, a nice guy, a research chemist she’d met at her sister’s in New York City. She’d only just suspected she was pregnant and had worked pretty hard to compartmentalize it so they could enjoy the expensive and carefully planned trip. But then she’d collapsed and nearly died and whatever was between them wasn’t made to last, so it just sputtered out. They’d parted, not as friends, but friendly—they still sent cards at the holidays some years and he never sent her a photo card with his blonde wife and the even blonder twins she’d produced, but she followed him on Facebook a little and could see the babies sausage-cased into matching wool buntings, each slung on a parent’s back.

What had come after was love-making and sex and fucking. Jed was creative and she was empowered. They used two forms of birth control so she could totally relax. He’d been very upset the first time she cried as she came and it had taken her an hour to get him to believe he hadn’t hurt her or tapped into some trauma she’d never disclosed—she had just felt so much for him, the tears had spilled over, salty like sweat but cooler, sweeter. She liked for him to talk to her and he liked to make her gasp. He’d make her demand more and more, his mouth and his hands and his cock, obscenities jumbled with endearments in his soft baritone. She loved his first, deep thrust and he loved her soft breasts cupped in his hands, half-asleep love-making on grey Boston mornings that never got any lighter, the promise of so much more and only that—enough. Only Mary naked in his bed, only Jed’s mouth warm in the hollow of her knee, an endless chase of not pleasure alone but complete satisfaction, that transient integrity they’d found together and would never forfeit. She fiddled with the platinum ring with its bouquet of diamonds and she thought of his face when she’d nodded yes and wished dealing with their own wedding could be so effortless. Or that they could somehow just skip ahead to the marriage—she knew marriage to Jed would be complicated, but its complications would matter, not like the shenanigans of a wedding, this wedding, Caroline’s huge New York City, hedge fund-funded wedding, any wedding she’d ever been to. She heard Aurelia’s voice, more emphatic, then perfunctorily ending the call “Tchau.” She wished she were sitting next to Jed in the golf cart, reminding him unsuccessfully not to speed, the fresh warm air on their bare arms, instead of the overly hot air circulating in the salon smacking her in the face, the fumes from the hairspray making her a little light-headed.

She’d just asked Aurelia how she’d met her boyfriend Clay (“he was my Union rep and we met on the picket line”) when Emma’s cousin Anne walked over. Anne Hastings seemed to be an acquired taste-- like Marmite, Mary thought. When they had met yesterday, Mary had talked to her for about ten minutes before she cooked up an excuse to pull Emma aside and ask, “Is she, like, affected or is she British?” Anne had been dressed to the nines for the relaxed midday buffet at Emma’s mother’s house, complete with a fascinator, the dyed magenta feather ominously dangling over her eye, a cornea injury just waiting to happen. She’d had a constant tall glass of iced tea in her grasp and the way she slugged it down made Mary wonder just what Anne had doctored it with. 

Emma had just looked at her for a minute, a little slower than usual, then scuttled Mary with her response, “Both? Her mother is British, from Yorkshire I think, and they went back there for a few years when she was about twelve. Then she did a semester abroad in London, so…that counts, right? I mean, she was born in Ohio, this town called—I’m totally not kidding you—Chagrin Falls.” After even their brief contact, Mary felt there was little of the conventionally bland Midwest about Anne but to blame her on Great Britain seemed unfair.

“Oh Mary darling! Finally-- your turn here. Well, you must be used to it—always the bridesmaid, no?” Anne sang out, somehow her speaking voice as pitchy as a mediocre American Idol contestant. 

“No. Um, no. This is actually only the third time I’ve been a bridesmaid,” Mary retorted. She’d been Caroline’s maid of honor and she’d been a bridesmaid for her college friend Beth and now Emma. She’d be happy to leave it at that given how today was going. She thought of the monogrammed binder in her tote bag and the manila folder on the table she called her desk at home, scraps of paper with costs, venues, a few pages torn from the local bridal freebie magazines, the lists of pros and cons of Rosecliff in Newport vs. the Von Trapp-y lodge in New Hampshire that had started neatly bullet-pointed and devolved into a tangle of abbreviations and curlicued doodles. She and Jed been engaged four months and hadn’t set a date yet. Jed was seemingly content to let her take the lead “I already had one of these, you get to pick everything—just tell me where to show up and which are my share of the bills to pay,” as they’d agree to split the costs, a battle he had very quickly retreated from.

“Oh, my mistake. You seemed so knowledgeable about all these quaint little traditions, so American,” Anne said dismissively. Mary would bet, well, she’d bet a lot Anne had grown up eating Dairy Queen and Big Macs but she didn’t need to add to the strife that Alice and Mrs. Green were generating, the uneasy electromagentic hum before a tornado. 

“’Traditions?’ Do you mean the sixpence thing? I mean, I guess. I wouldn’t say I’m a wedding expert,” Mary tried to extricate herself without being rude. Aurelia had perked up more from this exchange than from her artisanal iced coffee.

“Not an expert? Well, you’d better get on the stick, then, hadn’t you? I mean, Emma told me you were engaged and you better make sure you’ve got that all squared away, you’re not getting any younger, now, are you? You’re the type to get married, I should have thought perhaps a bit younger, though not all of us are made that way- we need a wider realm, the world one’s oyster. I shan’t marry, I think, it ties one down so,” Anne proclaimed. Mary was spared the need for an immediate response by Evander’s clever hands turning her around, the instructions he issued a nice diversion, even his wink the evidence of the many bridal parties he’d weathered. Anne clambered in the chair next to Mary’s and threw her head back, as if she were at an orgy, or posing for Playboy. Mary hoped she’d wrench her neck, but Anne seemed so liberally lubricated that it was unlikely. She glanced over at Aurelia who winked.

“There, all done,” Evander declared, several minutes later. He handed her a mirror so she could see the back, where he’d artfully arranged her hair in a complex series of braids and curls, then effectively shellacked it into place with the silver can of Aveda spray he wielded with the skill of a gunslinger. The rhinestone clip, a elaborate bow with loops and ribbons sparkling silver-white, was tightly anchored; Mary wasn’t quite sure what Evander had done and how she’d ever remove it, but he’d done as she asked—the pin wasn’t going anywhere. A trio of slim women with their ombre hair in a variety of Elsa braids came over next to deal with make-up. This, more than anything, rendered Anne silent, as she had to be still so she, like the others, could be painted and powdered and hope that the salon quality make-up would last the day. The one working on Aurelia was the most expert and said off-handedly that she’d be by at the hotel in the afternoon for any touch-ups before the photography.

Mary was pleasantly surprised that after the two hours of waiting, listening to Mrs. Green and Alice and their endless argument, and the British invasion sitting next to her, swathed in a zebra polyester cape, her own appearance was at least nice. Well, more than nice. She’d never be able to replicate this look, the smoky eye alluring but not collecting in the crease of her lids, the apples of her cheeks an orgasmic pink, her mouth painted to look like a juicy berry and her hair arranged like a Golden Age movie star’s. On a regular day, she swiped on some Burt’s Bees chapstick and a little eyeliner and even when they went out, she only upped it to her one darker lipstick and maybe some mascara. Emma was the focus today and all the pictures would rightly center on her; Mary would appear as a background singer, her appeal serving to amplify Emma’s glamor. Anyway, this is how she justified it when she took a selfie, which she generally opposed on the principle that people already thought about themselves far too much-- the cape dumped on the floor, her head tilted just slightly to the side and without allowing herself to second-guess it, texted it to Jed. 

**The fruit of my labors. Well, not mine exactly, but you get the drift. Hope the golf’s been entertaining. Don’t crash that cart. XO**

They must have been waiting for someone to pick an iron or whatever people did when they paused in golf carts on the green because Jed’s response was nearly instantaneous. _Christ, Mary. Are you trying 2 kill me woman?_ And then again, _Srsly, sweetheart—you look beautiful. I love you, you vixen._

Aurelia spotted her look then and said, “Ok, ok—I think we’re done here, you can see him at lunch if we hurry, you know.” Mary decamped from the salon chair, gave Emma a thumb’s up across the room, and set out, bracing herself for whatever the afternoon might hold. She knew, if she wasn’t sure, she could simply refer to page 5 of the binder for a reminder.


	2. No Jordan Almonds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The afternoon yawns ahead of them, interrupted by the din of Alice's argument and Anne's pursuit of an alternate future.

Lunch itself Mary gave an 8 out of 10. Most importantly, Jed was there, wearing a near-comical pink Brooks Brother’s polo and Easter egg plaid shorts, which he somehow made work, though she insisted he un-pop his collar during the meal so she could eat without giggling. He explained he was “reinterpreting the wedding theme colors through the lens of Hyannis and Choate.” He’d clearly had a good morning—had made real progress with his case report-- “it’s amazing what you can do when you’re not getting paged every 5 minutes for benign febrile seizure cases, they should be so lucky if that’s what on service this week” and had not crashed the golf cart but had also not had to play very much golf itself, the game he described as consuming his childhood “until Tiger Woods, then my parents somehow were not so ‘interested’ and switched to sailing and following the America Cup.” He’d even gotten to do a quick neuro exam on Henry’s uncle Jack, a retired hospital administrator with a penchant for Kentucky bourbon, who’d managed an unfortunate collision with a golf ball to the forehead although “the paths were clearly marked, Mary, but he walked right onto a putting green. It was like the landing at Normandy with golf balls.” As much as he deplored their lack of leisure time, Mary knew that Jed thrived on practicing medicine and had resigned herself to a lifetime of his editing journal articles on vacations and always packing the equivalent of a black bag for any flight as he was eager to deal with a medical emergency on a plane. She was not, having actually had to coach a woman through transition on a flight diverted to Des Moines when she was a second year resident. There hadn’t been enough American Girl doll sized bottles of vodka left on the plane to help neutralize the enormous adrenaline rush she’d had for the rest of the night though the voucher for a free flight and the adorable photo the parents had texted of Madison Ava, 7 lbs 4 oz, looking bored and pink in the traditional striped hospital stocking cap, had both been much appreciated. 

Jed was in high spirits, though she caught him glancing at her a few times, with a more contemplative look. She hoped it was related to her incongruously glamorous look above the neck paired with the plaid button down she wore for painting or gardening at her mom’s. He was getting texted a fair amount, which was a bit unusual for a weekend he was with her and not on-call, but he’d waved it off, saying “Ezra and Allison are having a fight about how to decorate the nursery, I think. Either that or what the middle names are going to be. They’re stuck on L names.” Jed’s brother and his wife were expecting twin girls this summer and somehow the expansion of their family had reignited contact between the brothers. This also meant Jed was frequently entreated to be the mediator or deciding vote in any argument through some mystically obscure logic Ezra and Allison employed. 

So, Jed was sitting next to her, his hand frequently abandoning the table for the more alluring locale of her thigh underneath her serviceable Lands End canvas skort, and the food was both delicious and easily eaten without messing up her make-up. She could see Mrs. Green’s fine hand in it, the veteran of many a bridal luncheon. She had actually gotten to sit next to Emma for about twenty minutes before Mrs. Green rotated Emma out but luckily, her new neighbor was Belinda, Emma’s father’s partner in their legal practice, a totally together older woman Mary knew would not be rotated out unless she herself decided to get up and leave. Emma had been pretty calm “I mean, it’s not like when that kid nearly exsanguinated with the Meckel’s the first day on service, Mary,” and appeared resigned to the agita Alice was fomenting “she’ll cheer up, that’s just Alice and my mom.” Mary had been leaning back, enjoying the conversation with Jed and Belinda and the absence of Jordan almonds, when she became aware of the change in the emotional tenor of the lunch.

Later, she would ask Emma why she had invited Byron Hale to her wedding. It was a silly question she knew, as she had already anticipated the jist of most of Emma’s response, “He’s my mother’s first cousin and we couldn’t invite her side of the family and not him” although she admitted she was a little surprised when Emma had exclaimed, “Well, we didn’t think he’d actually come! He travels for work and he lives in Alaska—I mean really, who would have imagined he’d really show up? And he brought that singing fish thing, that Big Mouth Billy Bass thing, as a gift—as a real gift, totally in earnest. I have to write a thank-you note for that fish, Mary!” 

Really, Mary mused, it was not so much Byron Hale, clad in the loudest plaid shirt she had ever seen, handing out his business card “Byron Hale, Medical Equipment Sales Rep and President, Hale & Hartty, Inc.” like a batting machine spitting out baseballs, as the entity he and Anne Hastings created when she attached herself to him like a megafauna limpet, or one of those gross hookworms Mary had always raced through studying because they skeeved her out so much but she still had to get a good grade in bio. Anne’s devotion to the single life was impressively short-lived; all it had taken was the appearance of Byron Hale, arriving in a cloud of Axe like Zeus in his gold shower seducing Danae, to transform her into a woman whose desire for the married state was unexceeded by anyone present. Or possibly in the entire continental Unites States. Jed hadn’t really known what to make of it, of Them, a duo without clear precedent, unless maybe it was as if Robin was clawing his way into Batman’s arms while Batman attempted to sell CPAP machines retrofitted with rocket boosters. Or something like that. Mary always found the Batman movies so unrelentingly dark in both theme and lighting she had trouble following them if Jack Nicholson wasn’t actively eating the scenery. Mary had whispered, “This will be interesting” and such was the degree of the Weirdness that Jed hadn’t responded with either his default cheerful innuendo or a soft, hot kiss to the skin beneath her earlobe, his beard tickling her insistently pleasurably.

She’d known they were in trouble, to varying degrees, when Byron came around to introduce himself, Anne somehow in tow, like a kid on a skateboard skitching off the back of a ’93 Celica. Byron had maybe scented blood in the water, but his eyes literally widened and glowed with an unearthly fire when she and Jed admitted they were both physicians. She thought Anne’s presence might actually help defuse the situation—well, she’d thought that for one delusional moment when her innate optimism once again led her astray. To no avail, did she and Jed try to explain to Byron that they were both only in fellowship, did not have private practices or any role in Boston Children’s purchasing department or budgetary considerations. Byron was determined that one or both of them would leave the wedding weekend as the proud owner of an American, no—Alaskan-made! CPAP machine, a twelve-pack of patriotic themed compression stockings, or bonus, BPA-free respirator tubing. Wickedly, Mary asked whether his company offered breast pumps, causing Jed to raise his eyebrow at her and mutter, “Something you want to tell me, Phinney?” but Bryon wrinkled his nose, which was not at all cute, and said, “Ew. No. What? You mean if the baby won’t, y’know… what, hitch on to the, um, mother ship? Gross. That’s what formula is for! Which we do carry, in bulk and now, to tempt some of those pickier eaters, we have some propriety blends flavored—pomegranate and toasted chia seed for the coasts and and a new barbecue one that’s been doing real well in Texas.” Mary snorted but Jed, who had the weaker stomach of the two of them, actually gagged a little, then tried to cover it with a swallow of Perrier. She gagged herself, softly, when Anne looked up at Byron adoringly, placed a manicured hand on his forearm and declared, “How clever! What American ingenuity! It’s so lacking in Mother England, such a shame to see that sceptered isle, that blessed plot, that England-- fallen so low! One can’t even imagine how you came up with such a brilliant idea, Byron— One hopes you are appreciated, don’t you agree, darling Mary?”

Jed took pity on her then, or had decided discretion was the better part of valor and that Mary’s spontaneous combustion would cast a pall on Emma’s wedding, and said, “Mary, a moment? In private?” and led her away from the table with a calming and directing hand on the small of her back. He steered her unerringly towards Emma’s father’s study. This looked pretty much like a Ralph Lauren ad, complete with artfully draped throw and pillows carefully placed to appear scattered, as if Jackson Pollack’s Number 5 had been actually painted by Georges Seurat. Still, it was quiet and gave them a chance to sit together on the leather loveseat, the view of the garden green and lovely with a rose arbor in bloom. Mary gently laid her head on Jed’s shoulder, not wanting to destroy any of Evander’s work, although she knew it could likely withstand a hurricane given the amount of hairspray that he’d used; it would take a very long, hot shower to get it all out, but she thought she might ask Jed to join her and they could try out the hotel’s fancy bathroom, all marble benches and clear glass. She thought of Jed naked, the long trim line of him, amid billows of steam and the scent of the hotel’s mimosa soap and wished the wedding would never happen or was already over.

“Are you going to make it through the day?” he asked. She knew he was joking, but also, that he was not joking. 

“Well, I’ll have to, for Emma’s sake and I can’t let Evander’s Heculean efforts go to waste, now, can I?” she answered. She wished they were going to take a nap in his hotel room, or walk around the Old City, or stop in that comic book store he’d read about online; she had no real interest in the comics, although she occasionally found an indie feminist comic from a local artist tucked by the counter with a big orange price sticker on it, as if it were a farce that anyone would buy it, nestled besides beek jerky sticks and the latest, weird flavored Altoid tin, and then she would buy it, because of Sisterhood!—but Jed truly loved comics, vintage comics and the actual real ones people coming out now. Mary was willing to read a graphic novel—she’d loved Persepolis—but the super-hero comics themselves left her a little flat. Especially now that they kept making all the movies about them and sucking out whatever weirdness made the comics intriguing in the first place. Jed, however, would be effervesent. She imagined him, coming to her again and again with his latest find, bemoaning that he’d left his favorite comic book hauling bag (yes, he had one—it was a huge score at Christmas last year after she’d had it custom-made with a silkscreen of Batman hugging Superman) at home in Boston. Even having to exclaim over the twelve comics he’d want to buy would be a pleasure, his face bright, the expression one she’d seen in all his childhood pictures until he turned 11. 

He’d explained that it wasn’t so much the advent of puberty that had rendered him sullen or squinting in every picture until he turned 16, but rather the emerging realization that he didn’t actually like his parents as people at all, even though he loved them. “No one else at school would have said anything like that, they’d all just started stealing their parents’ booze, all the gross stuff like crème de menthe, and trying to play truth-or-dare, like a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds had any truths worth concealing or could come up with a real dare.” Mary had looked at him somewhat baffled at this point in his declaration, since she had, at 11 and still now, liked and loved her parents and had spent middle school waffling between wishing she were National Velvet or International Velvet and angling to get a second-hand telescope. She’d still never had crème de menthe, partly because ever since dissecting one in 7th grade science, the prospect of consuming anything called a grasshopper was repellent to her. She preferred her mint via Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies purchased from the unit secretary’s daughter’s troop; she kept them in her freezer and they proved an endless delight as she would rediscover them periodically and realize she did have cookies in the house.

The comic book store visit was a fantasy and she knew it. Just like the nap and the walk around town—she was going to spend the rest of the day following orders and trying to smile through it for Emma, working hard to avoid being an accomplice to the unexpected disappearance (even in her head, she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘demise’) of Viscountess Hastings, and wishing she could have a chance to really spend time with her best friend—either the male or female version. She felt Jed stroking the top of her hand, his fingers occasionally grazing her engagement ring. Soon enough, they’d be the stars of one of these gala weekends, though she thought Jed’s family’s wealth and extravagance would be countered at least in part by the implacably down-to-earth approach her mother had by nature and after 32 years teaching public high school chemistry. Still, it would be an exhausting slog and she doubted she’d even be able to really relax for the first few days of the honeymoon, likely in Bora Bora or New Zealand if Jed has his way; the flight out would eat up a day at least each way and they’d only be able to take a week max unless they managed to pick a time when they both had really light rotations. 

“I don’t think it was a Herculean effort for Whatsisname, Mary—you’re so beautiful, sweetheart, even though I don’t think you need all the make-up, and I really mean that, I’m not just saying it because it’s the expected boyfriend response about your girlfriend wearing make-up,” he said. “I like how you look—I love how you look every day, after work, first thing in the morning, you name it.”

“That’s so, huh?” she said. “I’m not sure I want to show up in Emma and Henry’s wedding pictures looking like I do first thing in the morning.”

“Well, maybe it’s not a good idea. I don’t know that I want anyone else to see you that way, the way you look in our bed early in the morning, freshly fucked,” he replied. She laughed and swatted at him, as he had intended, and he caught her hand in his, brought it to his mouth and pressed a kiss to her palm.

“Was there a reason we decamped here, other than to escape Alaskan He-Man and She-Ra of London?” she asked, more relaxed now or at least more resigned to the afternoon about to unfold before her, hopefully like a morning glory unfurling its petals or an elaborate domino creation where the pieces all went down as planned. She wouldn’t bet on it, though.

“I did think the survival of the entire wedding party would be one more gift I could give Emma, but really, I wanted to check in and see whether you need me to do anything this afternoon. Samuel’s plane gets in soon and we were going to hang out, see the sights before we came back to get ready. Am I going to the photography thing with you?” he said, slouching down a little on the loveseat.

“I’m impressed—you must be channeling Hospital Jed because this is not Vacation Jed as I am familiar with him. Hmmm, you should probably double-check and make sure your tux is ok, like maybe it needs to be pressed again,” she paused, thinking. “I think they are doing the pictures with the wedding party and their guests after the ceremony—we are just doing the bridal party and Emma’s family before. Plus, I would bet 87 million dollars that our new friend Byron will be all over the pictures, so spare yourself, ok? Only one of us has to leave here with a case of edamame flavored Nutramigen. But, actually-- can you get our boarding passes ready for tomorrow before you and Samuel start watching the whichever superhero movie is on Pay-Per-View. Because you and I both know there is not going to be some scenic tour of Old Alexandria this afternoon,” she finished.

Jed turned towards her and said, “Yes, Dr. P,” and then, very seriously, “Is it going to really mess up your make-up if I kiss you now?” She felt the warm thrill he gave her when he turned his full attention on her, the same feeling she recognized she’d had over mediocre Gouda and crackers in a mid-range Boston hotel ballroom. She shook her head no and he took her face in his hands and pressed his mouth against hers. He tasted of sweet tea a little, but mostly of himself, and she felt she could easily sit the rest of the afternoon on that loveseat with him slowly making love to her mouth alone, the hot stroke of his tongue and his soft lips lush against her, his beard a little rough. The contrast was intoxicating. He was making little murmuring sounds of enjoyment as he kept kissing her, like she was his favorite chocolate souffle. One hand dropped from her cheek to play at the open neck of her shirt.

She pulled back a little and said, “You’re making this very hard, you know, I’m going to have to go back to being bridesmaid #2 pretty soon.” She felt flushed and saw his cheeks were pink as well.

He looked back at her with a wicked glance and said, in his lowest, dirtiest voice, “I think you’re making this very hard, Mary Margaret,” and drew her hand to his crotch where she could feel his cock straining against his shorts. He only used her full name when they were making love or asymptotically approaching it. He’d explained once he felt like “it’s unfair you only associate your full name with getting in trouble, or at least, not the kind of trouble you want to get into” but he’d also admitted he loved to say her name then for its debauched nun overtones. She had pointed out she was the most lapsed of lapsed Catholics and was not going to call him Jedediah Thurmond in the throes of passion, as if she were romancing an antebellum plantation owner. He’d only said, “All right, Mary Margaret” and redoubled his successful efforts at seduction. She wished she had not listened to her mother’s practical voice in her head saying “it’s not a bargain if you don’t need it” when she had passed up the wildflower embroidered midi skirt, just short of a dirndl, that Anthropologie had had in the sales rack at 40% off. If she was wearing that with her plaid button-down instead of the stupid skort, she could be on his lap right now, both of them demurely covered by the yards of green cotton scattered with violets and daisies, while she took his eager cock inside her and rode them both to exultant climax, sighing, “Jedediah,” in his ear to make sure he came right after her.

Alas, she wore the skort. There was a simultaneous ring and buzz of both their phones, each in a hip pocket, which effectively squelched the mood. Mary considered it the action of a merciful if imaginary God that they were parted by Jed’s Muppet Show theme song ringtone “Jeez, Mary, it’s so it doesn’t scare the kids when I’m examining them and it goes off. I’m a big guy with a beard, I don’t have that whole pre-Miley-wrecking-ball Hannah Montana wholesome vibe you have going on to put them at ease if I startle them,” and not the entry of, say, Emma’s slightly shriveled Aunt Dorothea. Mary took a deep breath, trying to re-equilibrate from the lovely humming Jed had evoked from every neuron, to check out her own phone. She glanced at it and smiled.

“What’s up?” Jed asked, having silenced his phone with a muttered, “I’ll call back later.”

“It’s Radha,” she said.

“She knows you’re on vacation, right?” he replied. He was one to talk—he encouraged his junior residents to call him at all hours of the day and night though he had gently pointed out to more than one intern that they didn’t need to call him to okay every Tylenol order; he usually waited until October to talk to them about it however. Radha was Mary’s very diligent and very detail-oriented second year resident the past two rotations; she was generally a joy to work with but had been known to call with questions about journal articles on Saturday mornings, which Jed felt was taking it a step too far. If they were not on-call, he had other plans for Mary on Saturday mornings and Radha had dampened Mary’s ardor, if not her intellectual curiosity, during too many waffle-fests conducted in a state of undress for Jed’s taste. Cleaning up the syrup generally cheered him up though. She’d told him once “neatness counts” and he had taken it to heart, especially when it came to her breasts and 100% Vermont maple syrup.

“She knows I was worried about that kiddo on 6, the younger one with AML. Remember, Tommy F.? His counts are all back and it looks like the bone marrow transplant took. I told her I was going to call in today, so she was trying to let me know the good news early,” she said.

“Then she is forgiven for once again interrupting me in my endless quest for a perfectly satisfied Mary Phinney,” he said, his hand warm on her waist through her shirt.

“I better get back out there,” she said. “I can hear some kind of commotion brewing and it’s better to get out ahead of it, I think. You maybe want to hang out here a few minutes until you compose yourself?” She gestured from his ruffled hair to the erection still tenting his shorts; it would be impossible to subdue the brightness in his eyes. She didn’t want that to change anyway.

“I think that’s a good idea. I’ll be at the hotel with Samuel but I might also run a few errands—the cell reception is a little spotty, so if I don’t text you right back, don’t worry too much,” he said. “We get to sit together at the reception, right?”

“Yeah, Emma drew the line at the bridal table where we would be on display like a panel discussion. Hey, Wear your lucky pink socks tonight and maybe I won’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight on you,” she replied, standing up and shaking the few creases from her much maligned skort. They both heard a particularly British yelp right outside the door and she weakly called, “Cheerio?” over her shoulder at Jed, who was already busily texting something into his phone.

Within minutes, Mary regetted leaving the relative serenity of the study. It was time to get back to the hotel, although she was not entirely sure that it would take two solid hours to dress herself and participate in arraying Emma. She’d just missed the car that held Emma and Aurelia and somehow, was jammed between Anne and Alice in the backseat of Emma’s mother’s Chrysler, while Byron Hale rode shot-gun. She wished that the dueling conversations, Alice’s ongoing and cryptic argument with her mother and Anne’s increasingly frantic attempts to engage Byron, her accent taking a virtual tour of the British Isles, might somehow neutralize each other. With her luck, though, it would more like Ghostbusters; she could hear Jed’s voice as Egon Spengler, “Don’t cross the streams… it would be bad.” She wished for earbuds or that she could even move enough to fish her phone back out from her pocket. She had a game of Scrabble going against the computer at the expert level and was enjoying not getting thoroughly trounced. She managed to bingo enough in skilled that she’d stopped playing it. Trying to remember what tiles she had and what she might make with a K and a J—maybe jackal? occupied her most of the ride to the hotel but only because she didn’t let herself acknowledge the level of hell she was occupying. 

Mary was lingering by the fountain in the middle of the hotel’s lobby, trying to absorb the tranquility of the flowing water, the utter unconcern of the orange and white koi that swam in the shallows, when the argument between Mrs. Green and Alice reached a fever pitch. She heard “Alice Evangeline!” in the loudest hiss she thought a human throat could make and felt a shockingly sexual frisson at the memory of Jed’s raspy “Mary Margaret,” powerful enough to make her want to sit down right there among the pots of ferns and palms banking the fountain. It wasn’t really a viable alternative, so she tried a silent “Om” which wasn’t entirely effective, but it did switch her brain from Jed’s face as he desperately urged her to orgasm to his comical rants on hot yoga, sweat lodges, and cupping. Alice’s shrill response to her mother was surely making all the dogs in a 5 mile radius howl and that really brought Mary back to the Hotel Monaco Alexandria, possible location of the initial engagement of World War III.

Mary was the younger sister, so she had a sneaking sympathy for poor Alice. However, she could not recall every having such a battle with her mother, let alone in public. Emma had occasionally griped about Alice being spoiled “because she was the oops baby and then she was so cute, we all kind of treated her like a doll, I guess. Or, my parents just got tired and let her do whatever she wanted,” but Mary had thought that Emma and Alice themselves actually got along fairly well, so she couldn’t really understand why Alice was bound and determined to disrupt Emma’s wedding. Or, to at least make everyone around her exquisitely uncomfortable. Even Byron and Anne had paused; Mary could see Byron trying to think of something helpful to say and had a moment of kindly fellow feeling which evaporated instantly when his voice boomed out across the lobby, “Is it the PMS? I have some vitamins for that in my car, chaste-tree berry blend.” Mary couldn’t be sure, she thought she saw an expression of distaste bordering on loathing flicker on Anne’s face, before she regained her stiff upper lip simper. Mary reminded herself that while she was stuck dealing with these people for the weekend, they were Emma’s actual family, bound to appear at Thanksgivings and Christmases for years to come. Mary could only hope the wedding was bringing out the worst in them all although her imagination failed when trying to envision a likable Anne or admirable Byron. 

When Mrs. Green took her aside, Mary was not entirely surprised. She was the only other remotely normal adult present and Jane Green had a wedding to orchestrate. She could see that Alice was getting to her mother; there was a rosiness to Mrs. Green’s cheeks that owed nothing to her Bobbi Brown Tawny blush and her nostrils were pinched. Mary prepared to throw herself under the bus for Emma, in the form of whatever task Mrs. Green was gearing up to ask her to undertake. She reminded herself that she had Jed and a big, white hotel bed at the end of this endless day as her promised reward; she was usually pretty over the moon at just having Jed on the couch watching something on Hulu, the dishwasher a musical accompaniment, so today’s prize was nothing to sneeze at. She must have been a very good girl, because all Mrs. Green asked, after rubbing the bridge of her nose, was to take Alice and walk to CVS to get pantyhose and clear nail-polish. 

Mary didn’t hesitate, called out, “Hey, Alice, let’s take a walk,” and observed that she was now the recipient of Jane Green’s thankful look and Alice’s deep and abiding skepticism of anyone in an alliance with her mother. Mary was not bothered by this. She had dealt with far more difficult teenagers where the stakes were much higher, kids who wanted to push off the next chemo to go to Prom or who cursed a blue streak at the same nurses who brought them yet another mauve emesis basin. Doing a primary care rotation at the local juvenile detention center, oddly named the “Training School” (as if the kids were being purposely coached by the benevolent State to be adult criminals) had also not been a walk in the park. And, from what the GPS on her phone told her, she and Alice would actually have to walk through a little municipal park to get to the nearest CVS. There was a Rite-Aid closer, but Mary was not that much a saint that she would forgo any respite from Anne.

The walk, the mild sunshine, the break from her sworn enemy aka her mother all seemed to render Alice Green calmer and more reasonable. She progressed from sullen silence to appropriate if unenthused ums and yeahs as Mary kept up a light patter about the weather, the city, the hotel room soaps. She sensed Alice was ready to rejoin polite society and ventured a, “Hey, help me out here—I can only talk about the pros and cons of separate shampoo and conditioner vs. those combos ones for so long. It’s been a heck of a day for me too—I’m likely to start talking to you about new chemo regimens next, not Game of Thrones or the Kardashian du jour, so, you know, maybe you could add something to the conversation besides, mm-hmm?” She knew she was in when Alice gave her a wry smile, so much like a blonder Emma that Mary felt an upswelling of warm affection. 

“Do you want to talk about new chemo regimens?” Alice asked, startling Mary.

“Well, to be honest, yes, but that’s always a yes for me, like watching the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, or re-reading Little Women. So, it’s not really fair to you to have to hear a whole bunch about tipifarnib,” Mary replied.

“I think you might be the only person at this wedding to care about what’s fair or what I might want to listen to,” Alice said bitterly. Mary thought Alice’s justifications for bitterness were not likely to amount to much on the global market, but her emotions had an intrinsic validity that maybe Mrs. Green hadn’t taken into account. Not to the same degree she’d put to deciding between peonies and ranunculus for the reception tables or the shape of the molded chocolates in the favor boxes. 

“Alice, maybe I am being nosey here, so feel free to tell me to mind my own beeswax, but what’s bothering you so much?” There, it was out there. It was up to Alice now to decide whether she would share. Mary schooled her face to the impassivity she tried to muster when 3rd year med students were wandering through case presentations or when her brother-in-law started extolling the Yankees.

“I want to change my major,” Alice said. Mary was taken aback; she would have guessed unsuitable boyfriend or spring break, maybe a semester abroad somewhere glamorous but irrelevant, like Monaco. Emma was Alice’s older sister though and Jimmy, though a bit of an acquired taste, was not exactly a nitwit.

“Yes?” Mary replied, trying to use some psych rotation mojo to get Alice to talk more. The attending in his comfortably cliched tweed jacket and sweater vest had said something about achieving a balance between curiosity and disinterest to try and get patients to talk more. It sounded good but she found it hard to know how operationalize it so she tried just letting the silence hang. 

“Well, Jimmy double-majored in politics and econ and went to law school and Emma did bio-- even though she minored in modern dance, no one cared because she got into like 12 med schools and her MCATs were 80 million. But I don’t want to be a lawyer or a doctor or a judge and evidently, nothing else is good enough!” Alice burst out, literally on the verge of tears. Mary made sure she did not smile, even a little bit; she still mostly recalled the dramatic intensity of being 19, even though her own progress through that phase had been abruptly fore-shortened by her father’s death. 

Mary thought Jed might have more sympathy for Alice than she did herself; she remembered when he told her how his father had never approved of him since he chose to go to Yale over Princeton. He’d tiredly said, “Mary, it’s a thing, I know, it doesn’t make any sense.” When she’d somewhat snarkily asked about how they felt about him not going to Harvard either, he’d said, “Oh, no one cares about that.” She had reached the total inflection point of bafflement then, could only pat him a little while she thought about how pleased her parents had been when she picked UMass-Amherst and then gotten the scholarship money to transfer to Emerson. They’d nearly had a ticker tape parade when Caroline got into Dartmouth, but Mary knew she wanted med school and had to take the long view on the loans she’d be carrying because she was going to specialize, so there was no Northern Exposure solution to salvage her credit history.

“So what do you want to major in?” Mary couldn’t imagine what major could have caused this level of acrimony. It’s not like Alice was talking about dropping out or starting a hydroponic marijuana farm.

“Geology. Although, my mother is incapable of paying attention to anything other than this f-ing wedding and keeps calling it gemology. I tried explaining the difference and how I have no intention of working at Tiffany’s, I even have an internship lined up and my professor said she would be my mentor, but you would think I am trying to join a cult,” Alice explained. Mary admitted, she hasn’t seen geology coming, which was maybe a thought shared by the dinosaurs and the 38 million people in California, though the Californians’ excuse was pretty weak at this point.

“I mean, does your parents’ opinion have to matter that much, then? They can’t actually stop you and if you already have an internship and a mentor… I get that you’d rather get their support and maybe after the wedding,” Mary started but Alice interrupted.

“They’re driving me crazy! All she does, in between telling me stuff I need to do for this wedding, which is barely what Emma even wanted anymore, is how I should reconsider. I mean, they’re freaked—they’ve given up on what they really want, which is another doctor or lawyer, and now they’re just trying to go for recognizable post-debutante, like English or sociology. I don’t want to do either of those but all they can say is geology is just 4 years of “Rocks for Jocks” and then they think I’ll end up at the Kay’s Jewelers at the mall.” They’d arrived at the CVS and wended their way over to the nail polish, where Mary snagged a few bottles of clear polish and dropped them in the plastic basket that was unwieldy, yet held surprisingly few items, then headed over to the hose selection, all those little boxes full of nylons that could only be worn once, control-tops like a post-modern chastity belt. 

“Um, Alice, do you know who we are buying this for? Like, sizes?” Mary asked.

“I guess, just get a few regular size pairs—none of us is that big and probably no one even needs these. It was just an excuse to get rid of me,” Alice said sulkily. Mary agreed the trip had been a pretext, but she felt like they might as well get stuff that would be useful as long as they were there. She decided to get a travel sewing kit and some Visine before they left. She picked up a king size Twix and tossed it to Alice, who actually smiled catching it, and said, “Thanks, it’s my favorite.”

“I know. Because Emma told me, and also, because it’s the best candy bar there is. I have strong opinions on this topic, I warn you. There’s a reason I’m a pediatric oncologist not an adult one, besides the whole saving kids’ lives piece. Kids get that candy is important,” Mary said. Alice laughed a little and Mary thought maybe she’d find a way to tell Jane Green to lay the hell off Alice. She’d make sure to enlist Emma once the wedding was over; she’d be on Alice’s side on this and would have been a strategic ally but being the Bride had pretty much neutralized her, at least for the weekend. Mary suspected Henry would also weigh in on Alice’s behalf, in his gentle, firm, inarguable, Quaker way. She and Alice each took a bag at the check-out, one of the flimsy plastic numbers that had a 60% chance of tearing before they got back to the hotel. Mary decided another stop was required before she could return to the wedding and Anne and Jane Green. She’d spotted a little café on the way over and thought they could find something cool to drink for a few minutes, maybe in that same little green and gold park.

Alice was amenable to this plan, as Mary had suspected. She got a humungous coffee drink with whipped cream and something drizzled on the top as though they hadn’t had lunch an hour ago. Mary just ordered an iced jasmine green tea, more to have something to nurse along than to quench her thirst. They found a little bench and both took out their phones. Mary’s was relatively blank. She had expected a barrage of texts from Jed, or at least a selfie with Samuel, a picture of their four bare feet at the end of the bed, representing the start of the movie marathon, something-- but there was nothing. She had a bunch of new shopping emails that she deleted and a few from Emily’s List and her local Planned Parenthood that she didn’t, though she didn’t expect to be writing a check to anyone until she’d hacked out a few more details on her own wedding plans. Next to her, Alice was chuckling a little, “My Tumblr feed just exploded.” Mary carefully typed out an email to the event coordinator at the hotel on Block Island she’d liked the look of, then messaged Jed.

**Hey, you and Samuel having fun? I’m actually hanging out with Alice now in the park before we go back to the hotel. Didn’t one of your roommates become a geologist with the US Geological Service? Maybe you can find his email for Alice—rocks are her passion, evidently. Love you.**

Then she opened the Scrabble game, played “raja” on a double word, and punted to Bejeweled instead while she waited for a response. She sipped her tea and stared up at the blue sky through the canopy of the trees. She closed her eyes and tried to meditate, which she wasn’t very good at, but she felt the attempt counted. Maybe her own wedding could be different from this one—it could be smaller and calmer, maybe it could actually be fun. She could make sure nearly everyone who came was someone she really loved plus Jed’s parents whom she barely tolerated. That’s where the fantasy broke down. Jed’s parents had very strong ideas about, well, everything and few of them overlapped with any positions Mary held. Even if she and Jed did everything the way they wanted, she’d be sure to hear about it the entire time. She’d couldn’t see how she could face it, but she guessed she’d have to, since certain things were non-negotiable, and becoming Jed’s wife was one of them. She’d gotten through plenty of awful situations—her father’s wake, the near-death experience on the ski slope coupled with the realization that she was falling out of love with Gustav, the week three patients had died, one after the other, all of them under five and having to look at their mothers’ faces and then not look away. An over-the-top wedding with a Cinderella dress and the snide comments of her in-laws as a constant counter-point would be something she could deal with. 

_Sry just saw yr text abt 2 raid mini-bar who knew Pringles cld cost $25? Sam says HI!!!!!_

She looked at a text for a few minutes and admitted the truth: she and Alice had to go back to the hotel now. The phone buzzed again as she was gathering her share of the CVS loot.

_eric.macphersonrox@gmail.com 4 Alice XOXO 4 u Sam wants u 2 know he’s keeping me in line_

“Come on, Alice. Once more unto the breach for us,” she said, buoyed by Jed’s inane texts. Maybe she’d actually get to talk to Emma for a few minutes when they got back. Getting dressed and having the make-up retouched would take a while and she’d get to hang out with Aurelia for a bit, possibly hear more about the mysterious Clay, the romantic Union rep. Alice acquiesced, mollified, though Mary wasn’t sure how long the peace would last once they returned but like Snoopy and the Red Baron on Christmas, she meant to make the most of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just changed the number of chapters from 3 to ? as I'm not sure if there will be 3 or 4. I tried to work a few of our other Mercy Street characters into this one but you'll have to pay attention. I hope everyone is as entertained reading this as I have been writing it. Perhaps Mary and Jed will actually get to some of the action Mary keeps fantasizing about so much instead of just kissing in the future chapters.


	3. Say Cheddar Cheese!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One binder to rule them all.

Mary couldn’t actually believe it, but it was possibly true that she and Alice should have headed back to the hotel earlier. Not because she had missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience or super-important plot twist (yes, she had watched soaps with her mom after school—Mary knew how big, splashy weddings went down in Pine Valley and Port Charles. She had also eaten Cheezits like they were going out of style, somehow, never ruining her supper as she had been frequently warned). And not because Jed had undertaken some elaborate, goofy, romantic gesture, like the Gorillagram he’d had delivered to her the first February 15th they were together “because no one is expecting anything that day and you deserve something special every day.” Or when he had had the Japanese place spell out “I love you” in Beluga caviar he’d brought to the restaurant himself on her dragon roll because the in-house salmon roe wouldn’t stay put and he’d wanted to make sure there was a back-up option. Sometimes, she thought he was channeling Tony Stark a little too much. But then he would start talking about the Hopkins PET scan Tourette’s study and what he thought of the study design and she was reassured. 

No, the therapeutic dawdling she and Alice had engaged in definitely came back to bite them. There were no amnesiac impostors at the hotel, no rainbow hot air balloon arrivals in the courtyard, no minor celebrity sightings but she would have had a little more time to plan and execute the repair to Alice’s bridesmaid dress which Anne had torn when she put it on, convinced that it was her own black lace concoction. There was a Hieronymus Bosch quality to Anne’s appearance that stopped Mary in her tracks.

If Mary hadn’t seen Anne in action all day, nearly getting whiplash from her rapid about-face from fancy-free world-traveling English spinster to the future Mrs. Byron Ignatius Hale of Juneau, Alaska, she would have wondered about Anne’s eyes. Did that maniacal gleam obscure an impressive myopia? Either that or Mary should just give up on trying to understand any of Anne’s motivations and just be thankful that she hadn’t brought her pet chinchilla with her in its travel hand-bag. This was another piece of information Mary was only lately privy to and yet wished she never had to use neurons to record. She couldn’t imagine what would have possessed Anne to try to fit into Alice’s size 2 dress, which was a one-shouldered floating chiffon with a hi-lo hemline, instead of Anne’s own size 10 dress made out of yards of black lace, the back dramatically cut out to showcase acreage of lightly freckled lats, and a glitzy rhinestone belt. Mary actually liked Anne’s dress a hell of a lot more than Alice’s and she had no issues with Anne’s size—Alice was also 5’1” besides being built like a twig and that chiffon was going to wear her for sure and not the other way around—but there simply was no similarity between the two dresses other than they were both black and in the same closet. Alice’s had been in a monogrammed Vera Bradley garment bag while Anne’s had traveled in a more basic polyester; that now lay on the gown like a snake’s discarded skin. Mary had kicked it aside with her three inch heel as she strode into the room, her intensity and focus a few degrees shy of running a full code. Of course, if she couldn’t repair the dress, Emma’s mother might go into actual cardiac arrest, so no pressure.

The first step was extricating Anne from the dress without causing further damage to the chiffon. There was also the issue of Anne’s breathing, which was somewhat constrained by the virtual corset she had created out of the dress; she had clearly made some attempt to take the dress off once it was mostly on, but her efforts had only tangled it more, like a Chinese finger trap. Mary wasn’t terrifically worried about Anne’s respiratory status as she had not stopped talking, shrieking, importuning and generally issuing exasperated decrees from the confines of the dress. Mary had an uncharitable thought about using one of the balled up pairs of CVS nylons as a loose gag, just so she could concentrate on the spatial puzzle Anne presented, but she would never, ever act on it. The angel on her shoulder shook a fist at the devil who was nearly flinging the nylons in Mary’s face. Alice had taken one, maybe two looks at the situation and parked herself on the stiff occasional chair in the corner of the room and was texting someone. Mrs. Green, who had previously been ineffectually supervising Anne (when Mary walked in, Jane Green was offering Anne a Xanax to calm her down “maybe you would relax enough to just slide out of the dress?”), seemed eager to hand over control to Mary, leaving Aurelia as a drolly competent second-in-command. At this point, Aurelia was mostly giving Mary moral support with a few ideas about how to move Anne around in the dress. Mary appreciated what a good teacher Aurelia must be, willing to let her students figure things out even if they risked disaster.

Finally, in a series of moves that might qualify for the Olympic Twister team, Mary managed to guide Anne from the dress. She felt a glow of satisfaction which lasted the approximately 12 milliseconds it took Anne to formulate and voice her comment, “Crikey! Took you long enough, didn’t it? I thought you’d never figure it out. I know having dear Byron here would be not quite comme il faut and de trop, but if only you’d thought to ask for his help! It probably didn’t occur to you—even though you seem a trifle elderly to me to still be in training, you are still only a student and not as wise in the ways of the world as a man as accomplished as Byron. After all, he has an associate’s degree already and a diploma from the School of Hard Knocks, as he says, dear boy, and he’s been a Mensa candidate three times.” Mary counted to 10, then she counted to 10 again in French, Spanish and the smattering of Mandarin Chinese she recalled from her lab partner Dana. It just barely worked. She knew she shouldn’t be so bothered by Anne, but the reality of the amount of work she had put into getting her bachelor’s, MD and an MPH, was still putting in during her fellowship, coupled with the triune insult to her age, experience and acumen, nearly caused her to walk out of the room. Aurelia, ever astute, saw that Mary had lost her temper and her sense of humor in one fell swoop and interceded.

“Would you really want that fox in your henhouse, Annie?” Mary revised her opinion of Aurelia to rank her as a world-class genius. She’d managed to find a way to jolly Mary back to see the absurdity of the situation while rendering Anne speechless at the prospect of foxy Byron Hale sniffing around her iridescent tail-feathers. Alice chose this moment to pipe up.

“So, how am I supposed to wear that now? It’s all ripped. My mother is going to go ballistic,” Alice said, fairly calmly, Mary thought. She reflected that Alice was enjoying her mother’s potential meltdown which offset any distress at what would happen to the dress and the ceremony tonight. She imagined Alice would be perfectly happy to show up at Emma’s wedding in whatever black polyester number they could find at TJMaxx in the next half-hour in order to stick it to her mother, but Mary was unwilling to let Emma be disappointed even though the idea of the sparks that would fly when Jane Green confronted Alice’s flint was deeply satisfying both emotionally and from a geologic metaphorical perspective. Fortunately for Emma, Mary was an experienced senior fellow, used to the wide range of slip-ups to nearly ghastly medical errors her residents could make and had Plans B-E in mind for most scenarios. Emma’s wedding was no exception. 

“Alice, can you get that sewing kit out of the bag? I think there will be more thread there than in the hotel’s kit. I don’t think we have enough time to try and get the hotel staff to mend the dress. I can probably just sew you into the dress for the night. You can get it professionally repaired afterward. Just, don’t go crazy with the Macarena or anything,” Mary said.

Anne apparently could not leave well enough alone. “It’s getting a bit crowded in here. I’d appreciate it ever so much if you could take your little sewing project elsewhere and give me privacy to complete my toilette in my boudoir. One does need to find a bit of serenity on such a trying day. Alice, dear, don’t forget your accessory bag or whatever other bits and bobs you’ve brought. One doesn’t wish to be disturbed again before the photography commences although if the make-up artist comes, please send her around to me first. I know she meant well, but poor dear Mary has absolutely wrecked me. It wouldn’t do for Byron to see me now, not like this,” Anne announced, as if to her adoring populace. She’d ended with a gesture to herself, indicating her push-up bra and nude Spanx.

Mary agreed that Byron seeing Anne in a state of dishabille would be a danger—that he might fall upon her salaciously or even worse, incite her rage by offering her some piece of medical equipment designed to address a flaw he observed. Mary wasn’t sure there was a bomb shelter or tornado cellar strong enough to withstand Anne’s wrath in that instance. She and Aurelia helped Alice gather together the torn gown, garment bag, scattered accessories and heels. They then relocated to Mary and Aurelia’s room to deal with dressing themselves in relative peace; it was a sign of their accord that Aurelia was able to just turn on a Pandora station and let the music play without any dissent.

Alice stripped down to her skivvies with the unconcern of the former swim team captain she was, entirely comfortable in her body and that body around other women. It wasn’t that she could have just as easily been alone-- she chatted, relaxed, with both of them about whether Wham! was cheesy or actually worth defending musically. Mary thought Alice saw them as not exactly extensions of herself, but parallel creatures, as incapable of causing her any distress as her own mind was; they were known unknowns to her. Alice shimmied into the black chiffon. Anne had torn it largely along the seams which was a blessing as Mary could not have done much about shredded chiffon with the CVS sewing kit. Alice held still when she told her to and it was easier than every surgery Mary had ever attended as the human equivalent of a robot holding a retractor but she enjoyed throwing the knots at the end in the same way. Aurelia provided commentary from her queen bed, agreeing that the seam was invisible again and lavishing Mary with what she felt was undeserved praise. The universe had stinted her on her forbearance in not eviscerating Anne, however, so she took Aurelia’s compliments as her due. 

As she took off the plaid shirt and the tease of a skort, Mary reminded herself again that sharing Emma’s joy at finally marrying Henry was the most important part of the weekend. She remembered when Emma had first, after most of the bottle of Chianti, described Henry as “such a good person, Mary, even when we’re fighting, I can just feel it and Jesus Christ, in bed, just, you wouldn’t think to look at him he would, well, y’know, Christ, he’s fucking awesome at fucking,” and Mary had known both in general what she meant and also how to contextualize Emma’s assessment of Henry’s sexual prowess based on many conversations on late nights in the call room. The bunk beds in particular always encouraged a cozy atmosphere conducive to secret-sharing. Emma had had a lot of false starts in the finding-a-good-guy department; their intern year had been a veritable romantic wasteland filled with lame dinners, lamer passes, and cheap drinks for Emma, who got asked out with impressive regularity. 

After the Chianti-fueled disclosure, Mary’d looked at Henry with an extra degree of respect for his unexpectedly wide range of admirable qualities. Jed had burst out laughing when she told him what Emma had said, an actual hoot of laughter had emerged from him into the darkness that collected beneath their plastered ceiling. When he could talk, he’d said, “Mary, you can’t tell me that stuff, I have to hang out with him and be like, hey, we’re just two guys watching a ballgame or whatever, we’re bros except the kind of bros where you are a Quaker dude filled with ‘the Light,’” and here he used finger-quotes not skeptically but to indicate his own limited knowledge of the Quakers as a sect “and not purveyors of oatmeal.” Jed had rambled on, enjoying himself she could tell, “And I mostly care about little kids’ brain plasticity and seizure reduction protocols, and now I’m going to have this image in my head of him just giving it to Emma, who, let’s face it, is like in the top ten for sweetest person ever. Phinney, you better have a plan for how I’m going to overwrite the memory of what you just told me.” Finished, he’d just looked at her with the challenge bright in his eyes.

Mary had always prided herself on her Girl Scout level of preparedness (although she’d dropped midway through Brownies), well before it was responsible for mending Alice’s dress and saving the wedding, and so she had naturally had a back-up plan in mind. To be honest, it wasn’t hard to have a back-up plan for Jed as long as there was some degree of privacy available because he made her more randy than any other man she’d ever been with. Like, by factors of ten. So, as per her usual, and without any degree of dissatisfaction or boredom at the usual recurring from Jed himself, she set to making him come spectacularly hard. That time, she gone with taking his cock in her mouth, one hand on his hip, the other stroking languidly from his perineum to his balls; she’d taken down her ponytail and let her loose curls sweep along his thighs. He’d become quite vocal with her early on in their relationship and this was no exception as he panted and moaned and even growled a little, barely able to articulate the “Mar—“ of “Margaret” as he came, always a gentleman with the warning touch, not tug, of her hair. It was largely irrelevant—she preferred to swallow. She reveled in his taste, the feeling of him getting soft again as erotic as when he was hard against her palate. She loved the longing in his eyes as he watched her throat undulate, watched her lick her lips clean. She’d asked him cheekily “So, do you remember now?” when she was done and he’d startled her a little with his solemnly tender response, “I only remember you, Mary, only you.”

She was taking her sweet time getting dressed with all her wool-gathering, she realized. Aurelia was already sitting on the bed, buckling the straps on her extremely high-heeled gladiator sandals, the sheath dress she’d chosen snug against every curve. The Guipure lace overlay was black but the lining was a rich pink taffeta, like the candy stripe peonies Emma was going to carry. Mary unzipped her garment bag and pulled out her strapless black silk dress. She looked forward to the expression on Jed’s face when he saw the complete transformation into Bridesmaid Mary. He was used to seeing her in scrubs and business casual, rarely a skirt or dress, and she had three pairs of increasingly scuffed black Danskos for the wards. She thought she’d probably expand her paltry collection of statement necklaces, kitten heels and von Furstenberg knock-off wrap dresses when she was finally an attending with the commensurate income and worked at least 50% outpatient, somewhere with a real desk with a blotter and maybe a brass lamp with the green glass shade. Emma had tried very hard to give some latitude in the dress choice. She’d found a designer whose collection she liked and just told them all to pick whatever they wanted as long as it was black or pink. She’d told Mary in a tired voice which Mary now supposed was the result of the battle royale she’d had with her mother over it. Mary appreciated it, although she always felt a little odd wearing black to a wedding. The alternative wasn’t worth it though-- she had the one stupid coral tulle monstrosity in her closet from Beth’s wedding; she kept meaning to donate it to some collection for low-income high school girls to bedazzle or redesign, like Andie in “Pretty in Pink,” and wear to Prom. She supposed someone creative could reboot it into a decent cosplay dress; there were enough yards of fabric to go to town.

“Can you zip me?” she asked Aurelia. Aurelia must have asked Alice to take care of her own zipper while Mary was spacing out, again. She would blame that on Anne Hastings because A) she’d driven Mary to distraction multiple times in under 36 hours and B) why not?

“Sure,” Aurelia replied. The zipper snicked its way right to the top without a snag. Mary was relieved when the dress fit as well as it had when she’d had it altered and she smirked a little to herself. She, for one, was sans Spanx. There wasn’t much wiggle room with a strapless dress—or at least, that was supposed to be the point, no wiggle. She slipped on the lace bolero jacket, pointy black heels, and added a string of pearls. It was a lovely dress if not quite the vintage style she preferred but she thought the bridesmaids would make a nice showing and she liked not being stuck in the same anything as Anne Hastings. Today’s events showed that could only lead to destruction. Emma had been right; the dress could be reworn, even if she didn’t have it hemmed. There were benefits and dances for with both their departments coming up and she could probably also wear it to a New Year’s Eve party, assuming they even left the house on New Year’s Eve. Previous years she’d spent with Emma, cartons of shrimp lo mein and gyoza from Red Pagoda, and a mutually agreed-upon chick flick. More recently, she and Jed had also stayed in and tried other iterations of bubbles, gales of jollity eventually dampened into his murmur in her ear and the sighs only he drew from her. He had smelled of Laura Mercier crème brulee and honey the whole next day and she could hardly resist tasting him when he leaned over to serve her eggs at breakfast with Emma and Henry. She did resist, but it required serious will-power and he had smiled knowingly as he moved to offer Emma the scrambled egg bake.

Jed’s mother had mentioned something about a big annual New Year’s bash she wanted them to attend the last time his parents had visited in Boston; it was sandwiched between her criticisms of Jed’s career choices and the damning with faint praise that Mary regularly received from her. “Eliza was just raised to expect more, Jed, you can’t fault her for having high standards, not everyone can be as easily pleased as Mary.” Fortunately, that had been a brunch, so she’d had the rest of the day to cheer Jed up afterward with a trip to Trader Joe’s including the requisite free sample and a lengthy make-out session on their couch. The sudden shift in his affect at the sight of her spilling out a little from her burgundy lace demi-bra had been dramatic, flattering and quickly much to her benefit. He had even been mollified enough to make several comments about just how easily pleased she was and she had gotten her own back when he stumbled over the coil of their dark jeans strewn beside the couch. Catching himself from falling had done some amazing things to the curve of his bare ass.

She hadn’t said anything to him about the grilling his mother had subjected her to in the ladies’ room over their own wedding and whether she was going to change her name. She had instead tried to redirect the rest of the meal to Ezra’s new babies’ anticipated arrival and whether they were going to Newport this summer. She knew if she’d told Jed about the restroom tete a tete, he would have announced to his parents he intended to take her name and then would have happily sat back while their heads exploded like piñatas at the ultimate whack. She’d already decided to keep her maiden name and Jed had said only, “It’s your name, your decision. I don’t feel emasculated by being the only Foster in the house.” Dealing with the DMV and the medical licensing boards would be too much of a hassle for Mary and she was already second or third author on a few papers under Phinney; it hadn’t made any sense to her to change her name and it didn’t make her feel like they’d be any less married.

Aurelia had given her a little pat when she was done with the zipper, a signal that said, “you’re all zipped up” and “hey, kid, time to get back in the game.” They were all ready now, so they sallied forth to Emma’s room to help her finish getting ready. Or to finish watching her get ready since it didn’t truly seem that complicated but it was part of the whole wedding process; Mrs. Green had given it its own event entry in the binder. Aurelia hesitated a moment grabbing her keycard when her phone buzzed a text; she frowned a little, then hurriedly typed something back, before shoving the phone in the beaded clutch in her hand. Mary’s cell pinged from within her black satin minaudiere, Jed’s ping—she had wondered about his radio silence, having expected a live tweet of a superhero movie or maybe some cogent reflections on Byron Hale.

_Do u think Michael Caine is immortal?_ he’d written, so she knew they’d gone Batman. Everyone deserved their own comfort movie or genre, she guessed. Her tastes ran to early Merchant-Ivory or the CBC Anne of Green Gables series (well, not the third abomination, but the first two). Just the sound of Colleen Dewhurst’s whiskey rasp was enough to drop her blood pressure. She tried to imagine it right now, but it wasn’t the same.

**No, because I watched Alfie and it’s clearly him but he was hot then** she wrote back. **We’re headed ovr to Emma now. You guys ok? Its been bizarro here** She thought she would be amply paid back by Jed’s reaction when she told him about Anne and her impromptu surgery-slash-sewing project but it was hard to get a lot of consolation from that as they approached Emma’s room and she knew Anne would likely already be there, sucking the oxygen from the room, hallway, and geographic quadrant.

_Hang in there, M Sam says hi & try 2 chill _She knew he was right and so she tried to think cool, relaxing thoughts, like guava sorbet and swimming pools on Memorial Day weekend. As she walked into Emma’s room, she considered a glacier might not be chill enough for her now, then she caught Emma’s eyes and was given such an understanding, commiserating glance that her patience was magically restored. Emma had clearly waited for them to arrive, since her dress was laid out on the bed before her but every other undergarment was in place. Her pale blue silk heels were set neatly by the closet door and the veil was still in its own plastic bag, hanging from a hook. Mary could make out the glint of the crystals in the beaded comb that would secure the veil to Emma and remembered how she had lobbied for that, arguing “you are already wearing a princess dress, you might as well get the tiara to go with it, it’s your only chance to do this and not seem like a pageant wannabe.”

“Now, Emma, just carefully step into the dress, and I’ll take care of the buttons on the back,” Mrs. Green said. There appeared to be 87 buttons and Mrs. Green was already wielding a button-hook like a samurai with a katana. Mary started to understand why Jane Green had booked “dressing the bride” for a solid forty-five minutes.

“Do be careful, Emma—you wouldn’t want to rip it. Mary already bungled Alice’s dress, poor dear girl,” Anne piped up. Emma shot Mary a quizzical look, having glanced at Alice who appeared entirely appropriately attired; Mary just gave her head a little shake, one she knew Emma would be familiar with from lots of nights at noisy bars or the enforced silence of their overly militant yoga studio, a shake which meant “I’ll explain later, but it’s ok, don’t worry about it.” Emma got into the dress without a snag, literally or figuratively, and everyone let out a little sigh as Mrs. Green started in on the buttons. Emma was just beautiful and the dress was perfection. Mary thought Henry might cry when he saw her and not just because he was already a pretty warm and fuzzy guy who she knew had actually cried at a GEICO commercial in the past (“but not Progressive Flo, Mary!” he retorted, as if anyone would cry for or because of Flo.)

The full tulle skirt spread around Emma’s feet, the lace trimmed train behind her, and she daintily extended each slender foot to be shod in the blue heels like Cinderella getting the glass set. Mary was aware that it had been a mistranslation and that the slippers were supposed to be fur in the original but she refused to relinquish the cut-crystal slippers of her childhood imagination in her mental monologue. Mrs. Green crossed the room to start fussing with the veil and Mary scented her opening and sidled over to Emma. 

“I’ve gotta run back to the room for a minute, I’ll be right back, okay, Emma?” Aurelia said, barely pausing for Emma’s acknowledgment. Maybe it was Clay, Mary thought.

“I’m sorry we haven’t had any time to talk today, I didn’t think it would be so… harried,” Emma said apologetically.

“Don’t even worry about it, this is your day. I just hope you’re getting to have some fun, I didn’t see an entry for that in the binder,” Mary replied, smiling.

“I know, right? She wasn’t always like this, at least, I don’t remember her this way. I mean, my mom was never like the cool mom, but that binder? She made one for Henry and the guys too but I think he just wrote down when they had to show up for the pictures and the ceremony and then emptied it out. I think he wants to try and donate the binders to underserved kids but I think he should just recycle them,” Emma said in a low voice, aware that she might draw the wrath of her mother upon them.

“Well, donating them is his problem,” Mary replied. It was such a Henry thing to say; well-meaning, but not necessarily efficient and the amount of time and money spent on donating the five or six binders could probably fill ten backpacks if he just donated the money to a good non-profit. However, it was such a nice idea that Mary hadn’t the heart to say much more. “He can figure it out, he barely has to do anything today—they went golfing in the morning but I made sure Jed didn’t wreck the golf cart,” Mary said. “Are you looking forward to tonight anyway?”

“Mostly yes. I think the ceremony will be nice but the reception should be more fun, especially once we get the official dances out of the way. It’ll be great to actually get to spend time with my friends and not just my weird relatives. Speaking of whom, do I even want to know what happened with Anne?” Emma asked.

“Um, no. No, you do not. But Alice’s dress will work for the night anyway and I think once Anne has Byron in her sights again, she’ll let up on the rest of us and by the rest of us, I mean me. If you get a chance, you might want to talk with Alice for a few minutes—I think she needs a little big sister TLC once you are off the bridal clock a little,” Mary suggested. She thought a few strategic minutes after the entrée and before the cake-cutting would go a long way with Alice. 

“So, is this making you feel better or worse about your wedding?” Emma asked. Mary thought about it for a minute, the lists on her desk, her mother’s genuinely happy expression when she had shown her the engagement ring, Jed’s mother’s perpetual look of superior disapproval. She was a complete cipher to his father, a zero in every category Eliza had aced.

“Christ, I don’t know. I mean, no offense, but my mom wouldn’t have pink and black plaid binders made up. I think she mostly wants to just show up in a nice suit, maybe a big Four Weddings and Funeral hat, and then just let it all unfold. Jed’s parents, on the other hand, I don’t know. It’s just-- I’m the wrong bride to begin with,” she began, when Emma interrupted her.

“Don’t even say that! It’s a load of bullshit, first, and it’s none of their business. I didn’t think Jed was still telling you anything they said,” she said emphatically.

“Oh, he’s not. He barely talks to them. It’s just anytime we spend any amount of time with them, his mother starts talking about Eliza, or his sister-in-law Allison, or his high school girlfriend Rosemary. I think she once talked about someone he was Sunday School with when he was 9. And then, I just know they will want it all done a certain way. It’s too bad I can’t make Caroline just replicate her wedding for them. They would have liked the big ‘do at the Plaza and the twenty piece swing band,” Mary said. She wasn’t really used to being a chronic disappointment to anybody and she could easily see how much Jed disliked being with his parents, but it was their wedding. And weddings meant families. And families meant therapy, official or otherwise.

“I think you should have the wedding you want, Mary, otherwise, what’s the point?” Emma said, direct and warm simultaneously, that way she had that you didn’t expect with her demure little smile and big eyes. She was like an emotional ninja, lethally kind. Mary wouldn’t want Emma’s wedding per se, but Emma herself seemed pretty okay with it. She supposed this was because probably because everyone Emma cared about was behaving in all the ways she would expect but essentially, everyone was happy she and Henry were getting married and other than the binders and the unforeseen tsunami that was Anne, everything was going according to Emma and Henry’s plan for the day.

“I guess the point is, we suffer through it and then we’re married and they leave us alone for a while,” Mary replied. She’d only admitted it to Emma once, so she wasn’t sure she remembered but she wasn’t enjoying planning her wedding without her father. Her grief over him could still cut her, unexpectedly, or strike her like a thorn, sharp and deep and aching. She thought of all the parts of the wedding she was supposed to share with him and how she would have to be aware of his absence; missing him was becoming more solid and suffocating than it had been for years. The last thing she wanted was a little candlelight shrine and she knew it would have been the last thing he wanted either. He’d been an unabashed atheist. Even though they hadn’t talked a lot about death, she knew from a few conversations over the years that he was pretty okay with just living his life and then accepting it would be over at some point. It was just none of them had expected that point would be after the second heavy snow in a miserably long winter when Mary was 19. Her paternal grandparents had both lived into their 80s and her dad had had virtually no risk factors. She had spent the rest of that winter looking out windows, at home and at college, at the rectangle of snow, white, less white and grey, looking for him in his old parka and muffler. She dreaded walking down the aisle without him. There would be only her mother on one side or she would completely alone, and worse would be the moment when she would want to look for his wry smile as he sat beside her mother in her oversized, Anglophilic hat and just see the slightly larger than average space between her mother and her Aunt Kim.

Emma reached out and took her hand. It was okay, it was more than okay, because it was Emma, though Mary generally was a look-but-don’t-touch kind of person, unless you were in the inner circle, in which case all bets were off (which she felt Jed would whole-heartedly attest to). Mary knew Emma meant “I get it” and “oh, sweetie!” and “you deserve better.” If it were an ordinary day or night, if they were sitting around drinking over-priced mediocre coffee from the fancy coffee cart instead of the bitter brown water from the hospital cafeteria or the Riesling Mary had grown to love from her time with Gustav but which she only drank on girls’ nights out with Emma and Sally out of solidarity with Jed’s sobriety, she knew they would spend the next twenty five minutes minimum in commiseration, consolation and grrl-power righteous emotional rallying. However, there were only seven minutes left in the schedule before they were expected to depart to Carlyle House. That was where the wedding was going to be held and they were due for the pre-ceremony photography. And, some of that seven minutes needed to involve Melisande the make-up artist (she’d thought it was Melissa and had been very curtly corrected) retouching Mary’s mouth where the lipstick had been kissed entirely away, and affixing Emma’s veil and artfully arranging it. She then used Mary’s phone to take a picture and gave her the instruction, “This is how it’s supposed to look the whole time.” As Mary was a pediatric oncology fellow without powers over weather, gravity and the embraces over effusive Southern relatives, she hardly saw how she would manage it, but she would of course give it the old college try. 

From the depths of the lace trimmed veil, now looking even more angelic than usual, Emma said, “Mary, honey, have you let Jed know how you really feel about all this, I mean, your wedding and everything?”

Mary shrugged a little, pleased to note that everything remained where it ought and possibly even looked a little better in the décolletage department with the movement. “Um, sort of, I guess? He doesn’t care about the wedding, he told me, he just wants to be married and I think he feels like he’s letting me have the fun of planning? And, then, his last few calls have been brutal, I think that resident Jules has a massive black cloud, and he’s just been exhausted at home all the time, plus he’s trying to get the paper ready to submit, so…”

“You should tell him. And when he comes up with something to make it easier for you, say yes, okay? Say yes,” Emma replied, that magical combination of best friend and older sister in her voice and with some strange, extra, benevolent gravitas, possibly conferred by the veil and the cloud of Joy she was enveloped in.

Aurelia was back from the room and Emma was finally ready. Anne had been absorbed with her own phone, a blessing Mary knew could not continue indefinitely, and Mrs. Green consulted the binder and started shooing them out of the room in the direction of the lobby, to the limousine that waited to take them to Carlyle House and the photographer. Mary had never been in a stretch limo quite this long and so she tried to appreciate it and take it all in, but that included the resumed whingeing of Anne Hastings, so she instead tried to do a little impromptu meditation. It wasn’t very successful, but started making a grocery list in her head since the fridge was pretty empty when they left and then remembered there was dry cleaning to pick up (all Jed’s, she never bought anything that wasn’t machine washable if she could possibly help it) and she had to bring her good watch to the jeweler’s to have the battery replaced when they got back to Boston. They had both taken the week off, but she expected it would be filled with all the errands and chores that usually got done on Saturdays. She anticipated a virtuous glow by the end of the week derived from knowing the oil was changed in her Subaru, the laundry was mostly caught up, she’d dealt with whatever wedding nonsense she could and she’d balanced out the extra waffles Jed was sure to ply her with with the requisite number of cardio circuits. Excitement and glamor were not on the docket but she could live with that.

Between the mental list-making and adjusting her skirt to make sure it didn’t get crushed, the drive from the hotel to Carlyle House passed uneventfully. They exited the limo with various degrees of grace; Emma, of course, seemed like she was born for this moment. A light breeze caught her veil and made it billow behind her in a way Mary knew the photographer would have longed to shoot. They carefully walked around to the gardens. Here, everything was in balance—manicured box hedges were offset by drifts of pink and white roses, irises flirted with the brick paving, and a small gazebo looked both freshly painted and eternal, as if it had grown in its spot just as the red maple that cast the shadows on its fluted shingle roof. Mary saw the photographer had dumped a few bags of equipment near a side door and was roving around, squinting against the sun that dappled the garden, clearly evaluating the location; she recognized the expression from every triage nurse she’d ever met.

She was pleasantly surprised to discover that the photographer was an extremely calm and sensible woman named Georgia with cobalt blue hair in a fishtail braid. It became rapidly clear that she knew exactly what she was doing, had worked with a wide variety of wedding parties and took no crap. Mary and Aurelia exchanged a relieved smile at first time Georgia laid down the law with Mrs. Green, who had starting fussing over Emma’s train or whether Alice should reapply her lipstick. Mary thought she remembered Emma saying Henry had found the photographer. They planned to spend a real chunk of change on that part of the budget “because the food being amazing is not going to be worth very much 25 years from now, but a great set of pictures will be worth every penny.” 

Unfortunately for Georgia, Mary suspected she was going to be earning every penny with blood, sweat, tears and the increased intracranial pressure of a thousand suppressed curses—somehow, some way, just as she was starting to get them arrayed in front of the gazebo, Emma’s father having silently slipped in like a silver ghost (or was that in a Rolls Silver Ghost?), Byron Hale emerged from behind a box hedge. It was like the converse of the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Anne let out a yelp she tried like hell to convert to a joyful, ladylike titter; the result was a curdled sound, like a bad batch of Devonshire cream. Aurelia’s smirk in response was nearly audible and Alice and her mother sighed in unison, the first time they had been united all day.

If Mary had been asked how Byron Hale would be dressed for Emma’s wedding, she actually would have done a decent job with the guess—on paper. On paper, she would have supposed a string tie with a silver moose head securing it and a vest made out a silky fabric printed with the Alaskan state flag, a red bandana masquerading ineffectively as a pocket square and dress pants with a phosphorescent version of Han Solo’s Corellian blood-stripe. Oh, and cowboy boots, elaborately tooled, the deep red of arterial blood. She had pretty much nailed it, except somehow, in real life, it took on an aspect of simultaneous complete, nearly psychotic bizarreness and yet Bravo-level reality TV compelling, as if you would ask yourself, what else would Byron Hale wear? His face was eminently normal, his beard neatly trimmed, and she caught only the slightest hint of cologne now. He smiled to see Emma, the nice smile of a nice, boring man who you’d expect to sell life insurance or work as an actuary, and then, the eye of the storm passed and the hurricane returned. He began to speak.

He started off as if normality would reign and Georgia just asked him to step aside once she clarified he was a guest and not a stalker or recently fired employee of the venue. However, as each moment passed, his remarks and observations became increasingly intrusive and disruptive. He offered suggestions for poses, all of which Anne tried to perform, as lasciviously as possible, and explained what a colossal waste of money he thought hiring a professional photographer was “I could have taken care of this for you, I have a great deal on disposable cameras I picked up, it would have added a little grit to this wedding— the boxes are camouflage patterned.” Georgia tried sending him on an errand, likely intended to remove him from the scene for a significant period of time on a wild goose chase. It was as if he saw through the ruse and returned from the building within 2 minutes, stating, “Yeah, that’s never gonna happen. And I didn’t bring the flesh colored, inflatable hemorrhoid doughnut pillows with me, so you’re out of luck there too. I would have comped them as a wedding present to you, Emma, on top of the fish, I know, I’m too generous, everyone says so.” Anne kept calling out virtual non sequiturs to indicate either her deep connection with Mother England, including “Rule, Britannia!” and “collywobbles” and “take the mickey!” or various commendations to Byron. She went so far that Emma’s father, whom Mary had wondered might be either deaf, mute, or a literal pod person, finally shushed her very politely but very definitively. It worked for about 3 to 4 minutes. She hoped someone had accidentally left their phone on, recording at least the audio, since she could never really recreate this experience for Jed and he would have been transfixed by it before he fell to the ground laughing. Aurelia had a sly look about her, she might have.

She had to hand it to Anne and Byron, or maybe to the universe, a Higher Power or the number 42, but the series of events that started with Georgia redirecting Anne to once again stand back and stop crowding Emma, followed by Anne’s plummy exclamation “I say, hard cheese!” and Byron’s rapid-fire maître fromager impersonation, “Say cheddar! Swiss! Camembert! Cotija, Emmental, Limburger! Stracciatella di bufala Provolone Stilton” led to Mary’s second favorite photograph from Emma’s wedding. It arrived a few weeks after the wedding, in a beautiful silver double frame chased with roses. On the left side was a black and white picture of Emma and Mary, both laughing exuberantly, the archetype of a perfect candid shot. Georgia had captured their surprise and the shared moment they laughed aloud together and heard that it was the same moment, the joy of it lit in their eyes. The black and white of their dresses was an abstract painter’s dream, the contrast of Emma’s tulle skirt and Mary’s silk graphic and striking. The note, on embossed and monogrammed Crane stationery, had read, “I have the one on the left on my bureau at home, next to the just married shot G. got. I’m not sure you guys are going to be able to top the one she took of you though. Love, E&H” in Emma’s fluid cursive. Mary kept the pictures on her bedside table, where she could see them when she went to sleep and woke, those liminal, sensitive times when she could most easily feel the delight and affection in the shots, a perfect warmth. 

She kept the note in the drawer and the sight of Emma’s elegant, looping g’s and y’s, the ampersand nearly calligraphied reminded Mary of what Emma bemoaned whenever they reminisced about med school, how the training director had complimented her at the graduation, “Congratulations to Dr. Emma Green, known to have the best handwriting in her entire class!” Emma never ended with that though. She always pointed out, “And Mary, we had an electronic medical record for two years already!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, now we have rejoined the bridal party at the hotel to get Emma ready and then to the wedding/reception site for pictures. In a sign the the universe is a fan fiction writer, I picked Carlyle House as the location for the wedding from the little clip on the NoVA wedding venues page, just a picture, date it was built, and guest capacity. When I returned to look for more pictures to describe the back garden, what did I discover but that IT IS MANSION HOUSE! From the website for Carlyle House:
> 
> Following John Carlyle’s death, his heirs sold off bits and pieces of his property over time. Beginning in 1847, local furniture manufacturer James Green began reassembling the original Carlyle acre of land. He managed to acquire the three-quarters of an acre that remains today. He bought Carlyle House itself, then known as Mansion House, in 1848. On the property at that time was an 1806 building that had been a bank. Green converted this building into the Mansion House Hotel, one of the finest hotels on the East Coast. He expanded the hotel in the mid-1850s, completely hiding the west façade of Carlyle House from the street. Union troops occupied the city of Alexandria in May of 1861 and billeted in Green’s hotel. In November, the Union Army evicted Green and his family from both the hotel and their home, Carlyle House. The Union converted the hotel into a hospital for Union soldiers, and used the mansion as quarters for doctors and high-ranking officers. 
> 
> I plan for at least 1 more chapter (ceremony and reception) and possibly a honeymoon chapter/epilogue. I think Anne and Byron still have a lot of havoc to wreak...


	4. You May Now Kiss the Bride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time for The Talk.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Mary, and I think-- I think you should stop planning our wedding,” Jed said. He was looking right at her when he said it, his dark eyes earnest but not apprehensive. Somehow, he thought she would be able to accept those words while she sat in black silk and pearls, in a softly lit library away from the happy noise and bustle of the rest of the celebration. That’s where her mind went first, anyway, to the puzzle of those words in this place—it was a distraction, a protection against everything else that was collapsing inside her. She knew her heart still beat but she could not feel it; she was in some sort of placeholder space, like when Harry died at the end of Deathly Hallows, before Dumbledore sent him back to face Voldemort. She had the sense she would not be able to stay there much longer and the pain that she would have to deal with would be terrible and long and maybe crippling. She’d never experienced a pain like it, but she had some sort of animal awareness of it approaching her, a dread that turned her cold and dull. Anger was a long way off.

“Are you really breaking our engagement at Emma’s wedding reception?” she asked. It was inconceivable, and not in the funny Princess Bride-Wallace Shawn-Vizzini way, but as if her mind could not understand the structure of language, the structure of emotion suddenly beyond foreign, utterly incompatible with anything that had come before. It was inconceivable in the way she feared she would never carry a baby of her own, an emptiness it would take a very long time to plumb, let alone fill. She felt the shame at her foolishness creeping up. She was about to be one of those women who said, “I never saw it coming, I was totally blind-sided!” And all her girlfriends would nod consolingly but afterward, two of them, maybe not Emma, she was too soft-hearted, but Beth and Caroline, or maybe Dana, would glance at each other. And one of them would say, “You knew, right? Like, for a while now but you can’t tell someone what they don’t want to hear and she liked him so much. So much.” 

She swore there’d been no sign, though. Yeah, they fought, who didn’t? But it wasn’t very hard to make up and they didn’t just rely on sex for resolution. She’d never been very impressed with make-up sex; after a big fight and the accompanying even longer discussion to process it, she might be up for some intense snuggling or hair stroking, but she rarely felt passionate. Crying a lot, which she still did more than she thought she would at her age, always gave her a throbbing headache. She didn’t think anyone, even anyone who really loved her, would say she was a pretty crier. The whole next day her eyes would be puffy and pink and the tip of her nose too. She felt she had an unfortunate resemblance to a possum. Jed, even if he had been in the right, would coddle her a little, bringing her cold compresses and letting her control the remote, even if she mostly ended up editing the Netflix queue. He’d always sleep closer to her the next night, his hand on her bare thigh under whatever oversized college tee-shirt she’d chosen as pajamas, ready to kiss the back of her neck.

What had she missed? What had he needed from her she wasn’t giving him? She hadn’t thought he really wanted to deal with the wedding, so she’d taken it on and she’d found some satisfaction in knowing at least the flowers would be exactly what she wanted and she could make sure they didn’t have carving stations or the unnecessary risk of a chocolate fountain. Still, she’d been rather short with him about the planning and hadn’t felt like talking about the multiplicity of demands and pointed suggestions his mother had been making since the day they told her they were engaged. They’d both had months of difficult rotations—it was hard to be entirely present and concerned when he told her about a kiddo he was worried about who probably had Lesch-Nyhan, another whose seizures weren’t responding to any conventional treatment but who wasn’t a surgical candidate, when she was worrying about her own caseload. Would Hannah make it to Prom, could Owen’s parents bring themselves to meet with the palliative care team, what would the Baxters do if the new baby wasn’t a match for Sofia? She didn’t want to make it some sort of ghoulish competition about who had worse outcomes to face, whose job was more difficult—but there had been a lot of days where she hadn’t had much left when she got home and it was hard then when they both needed and had little to give. Also, it had been bad luck, but she hadn’t had a really good mentor since Bridget Brannan went off service after she got her grant and she downgraded her FTE status. Mary missed her incisive commentary, impressive grasp of the latest research and her sense of humor, which ranged from gallows to a predilection for Bertie Wooster. She hadn’t known how much it meant to have such a good supervisor until Bridget was gone and there’d been a series of competent attendings who were not very invested in training. Mary had started to notice the slow erosion of her own equanimity. Had she been too absorbed with her own stuff to notice Jed was struggling?

She’d thought the wedding weekend would provide a little break from the drudgery regular life had become and that they’d be able to get some time to themselves. The past two days had been okay—still not enough time together, but she hadn’t felt any real distance from him. The staycation in Boston she’d expected to follow had seemed to promise enough sleep, enough time to make a real meal that did not include boxed pasta, and even some sort of frugal Boston adventure like an inaugural Swan Boat ride or an off-season trip to Provincetown before it was summer raucous. They’d take the ferry wearing fleeces against the wind and drink coffee in disposable cups so they wouldn’t have to lug around travel mugs. There would be confident gulls coasting on the air-currents and maybe the good luck of a harbor seal. They could watch the green sea grass wave in the dunes and see the way the sky layered itself over the water. Then they could sit in a restaurant all afternoon nursing coffees and breaking off pieces of a shared pastry, each with a second-hand treasure they’d found at Tim’s Used Books; Jed would have bought her the book she had reluctantly put back, telling herself only one was enough. They might not even take the ferry back the same day—there were sure to be B&Bs willing to book a room at the last minute and she’d sleep naked in Jed’s arms, happy the proprietor still had a down duvet on the bed. Would it have helped?

When Georgia’d finished taking pictures before the ceremony, it was as if they’d passed into some other charmed sphere, one where everything went right. The bridal party had gone to wait briefly in a little antechamber of sorts until it was time to walk down the aisle. Byron Hale had wandered off somewhere, lured by a good fairy perhaps, or the savory fragrance of angels on horseback. Anne had gleaned something from him, Mary couldn’t say what, but it had been enough to transfigure her into a state of serenity that reminded Mary of Ingrid Bergman’s Sister Mary Benedict, sans coif. Mary tried not to pay too much attention to Anne, afraid she would somehow upset the tenuous forces that had led to this state of near-perfection. Alice had sidled over to Emma and was doing sisterly kinds of things, adjusting a hem or the edge of the veil, talking quietly but making Emma laugh. Her tectonic plates had settled for the time being it seemed. Mary and Aurelia were taking turns peeking out the door to see guests accumulating in the rows of beribboned gold chairs. There were some very impressive hats and they had started a tally; Mary had bet on an even number and had a 50-50 chance of winning Aurelia’s secret Portuguese codfish fritter recipe. Aurelia was getting the relative short end of the stick, since Mary could only offer up the puits d’amour recipe her mother had learned during the year in Paris she and Mary’s father had spent right after they got married. It made a delicious pastry, especially if you liked raspberry jam, but the recipe hadn’t been modified in any particular way and Aurelia could have just Googled it. It was pastry, you either had a light hand or a leaden dessert. She was a good sport, Aurelia, and had been willing to take the bet even after Mary’s full disclosure.

Soon enough, the site coordinator, a blonde woman in a black dress named Alex, started quietly telling them “It’s time, line up” in various ways, since no one really responded to her the first time. Her tone of voice didn’t change at all which suggested to Mary that no one ever listened the first few times Alex told them to get ready and that Emma’s bridal party was no better or worse. From what Mary could see, the informal pews were all filled and she thought she recognized the back of Jed’s neck above a well-cut charcoal suit jacket. He was a fair ways off but she had spent a significant percentage of her life observing and caressing that neck so she was pretty confident.

The light streaming through the windows was a silvery gold, electrum in photons, and it was not forgiving like candlelight, but was rather generally enhancing. Everyone seemed to be a lovelier or more handsome version of themselves and dresses that Mary would later wonder at—the slit to the thigh, the waterfall of sequins over a capacious bosom, the cut-outs that suggested a truss or an unraveling mummy, all of these somehow were whimsically charming or unexpectedly appealing. Mary followed Aurelia down the aisle, her perfect posture in Guipure lace an unwavering guide, the music some little known chamber piece that Henry had spent months researching. She saw Jed as she approached the altar and he did not mouth “I love you” or “You’re beautiful” nor did he wink or make any other suggestive-yet-not-exploitive leer. He only looked at her so intently and she thought she’d seen all the feelings he had for her like a kaleidoscope, reconfiguring in infinitely more wonderful ways, endless perfect stained glass windows. Her feet kept walking at the pace Alex had commanded before she’d nudged Mary forward. But all she wanted to do was turn to him and take his hand, to be somewhere else with him and know there were no limits on the time they might spend, the words they might say. He would be as close as possible and would yet remain other, himself, but he would be most beloved. Her most beloved.

The music and the light were a cloud around her as she stood next to Aurelia and tried to watch Anne and Alice walk toward them, and then veiled Emma, angelic and beaming, but her eyes were drawn again and again to Jed. He looked steadily at her and it was as if there was nothing else for him to see, only her. She had felt the power of it all over, like sunshine touching her skin. She was strong and easy and content. She noticed the little movement that was Aurelia shifting slightly closer and her contained exclamation, “ _Droga_! I’ve never seen a man look at a woman like that, Mary, like he looks at you. He can hardly wait for it for be your turn, eh?” Mary heard the ceremony progress, but she didn’t listen to it. She wished, the way she had wished for the big present at Christmas when she was a little girl, whole-heartedly and without a real sense she could be disappointed. She wished she was standing with Jed before some officiant, it didn’t matter who, and that after they said their vows, they’d be sent off as husband and wife into a future where she would always have him by her side.

Now he was sitting in front of her, leaning forward a little, so handsome and all she had ever wanted, telling her: No. No wedding, no sandy trip to Provincetown, no future with three little dark-haired kids clamoring for another ride on the Swan Boats. A room away, a world away, twenty-something waiters were stalking around with trays of champagne flutes during the cocktail hour. The moment after her question had lasted forever. She could feel the numbness ebbing and the hurt of his rejection sharper with each fragment of time that passed. Was she going to have to ask again? If he didn’t answer, would the answer be no?

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. No, Mary, no, oh Christ, sweetheart, that’s not what I meant at all, I want to marry you more than anything,” Jed exclaimed. He nearly jumped out of the club chair he’d been sitting in and shoved the low table in front of her aside so that he knelt before her. He took both her hands in both of his and she let out a shuddering breath as he started talking again.

“I’m such a fucking idiot, I can’t believe—Sam told me, he’s going to kill me, he told me to think about how I said it and I still said it the worst way, the most fucking stupid way I could. You’ve been so unhappy and I could tell, it was the wedding, the whole thing was making you miserable and all I wanted was to make you happy again, my happy Mary, and Christ! You thought I was breaking up with you at Emma’s wedding? I would never, I love you, Jesus, I’m so in love with you, so much, you’re all I want,” he said, castigating himself, explaining himself while he held her hands, tightly but not so her engagement ring dug into her fingers painfully, just enough to feel it. He was looking at her with such concern and love and guilt, she relaxed another level. Short of doing shots, which she never felt was a good idea, it was going to take a while for her to come back to an everyday cortisol level, let alone the lovely sense of oxytocin-mediated calm she’d had during the ceremony. But this was progress.

“Then, why? What did you mean, why did you say that?” she asked. She was trying to keep it together, letting his voice repeat “I’m so in love with you” in her head, the cerebral equivalent to the warm clasp of his hands. She was just this side of tears and she didn’t especially want to find out if the Aveda mascara really was waterproof. She wouldn’t have worried if it were Maybelline, but that stuff was a little terrifying in its own right.

“Can I?” he gestured to the spot beside her on the velvet loveseat and she moved over a little bit so he would have ample space to sit, but he ended up right next to her anyway. He was dressed so elegantly and she could smell the vetiver again, but even more she felt his warmth, the appealing scent that was just him that she recognized from their bed, his eyes upon her so apologetic and affectionate; she couldn’t resist leaning towards him and his response was immediate. He shifted so he could take her in his arms and he held her close. The urge to cry was receding, little by little, helped by the feeling of his body against hers, his lips at her temple. She felt his mouth near her ear, his breath was soft against the shell of it and then he started speaking again, very quietly.

“I love you Mary, so much, you’re my best friend, my most beautiful girl. There’s nothing I want as much as you being my wife, I don’t want you to ever doubt that, not ever, no matter how much of an ass I might be,” and he somehow pulled her closer then as he felt her cheek move in a little smile, “I know I am, at least I warned you about that, right? I want you to know how much I love you, the way I think you did a little while ago—I want to put that look on your face everyday, you looked so happy.”

She sighed a little. In his arms, his voice in her ear, her earlier fears seemed exaggerated, though not groundless. They should find a time to talk about them, but right now, she just wanted more of him. “Is that all you want?” she asked, her own voice a little unsure.

Now his voice changed in tone, she heard his amusement and desire as she had wanted to, to make sure he still wanted from her everything she longed for from him. “Oh, sweetheart, you know that’s not all I want-- but it’s what I want the most. I’ll tell you, since I think you need me to, I want to make love to you, even right now when I really shouldn’t… I want to lock the door and take this pretty dress right off you and kiss you everywhere, I want to make you come. I want it to be so good you can hardly remember anything else and all you do is ask me to take you again and again and I will, I will, lovely, my lovely girl, so fucking beautiful, Christ, you feel so good,” and he moved his hands from her back as he spoke, one to her breast and the other he stroked down to the curve of her bottom, her hip. He’d spoken so softly but so intensely she felt completely sensitive to every touch, still hungry for him even as it was nearly too much, just his voice and his hands on the black silk.

“Later, I promise you, Mary, I promise I will do everything you want, anything you want but I want it to be good, just ours, no interruptions… I don’t want anyone knocking on that door and I don’t think I could get through the rest of this wedding if I had to see your face the way it looks after I make you come, God, I love that face, I love how much you want me, I love how passionate you are, so smart and kind and patient, you’re the sweetest woman… I want you, be my wife, please don’t make me wait anymore,” he said, breathless as he finished and then he grazed her mouth with his. He didn’t try to open her mouth, kissed her like he would at a wedding, their wedding. She was overcome, dazed, she wanted to say yes to him in every way. 

The part of her that ran codes, that could keep explaining treatment options to the weeping but demanding parents of a 2 year old with a rare cancer, that had managed to get through her father’s funeral without crying, that part was still active and made her draw back and ask, “I don’t understand. Don’t wait? Don’t plan the wedding? What do you mean, Jed?”

He sat back a little but he still held her hand in his and he stroked her wrist with his thumb as he answered, “Well, like I said, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, what we should do about the wedding, and then—you texted me, you texted me this morning and said we should elope and I knew you were right. That’s what I think we should do, so I, um, spent the day doing that,” and then he fumbled with the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out some papers. She stared at him. He offered, “Samuel was very helpful.”

“So, these are boarding passes for a flight to Paris, leaving Dulles tomorrow afternoon. We can’t actually get married in Paris, it’s a nightmare unless you plan it out months in advance, but you can, we can get married in Virginia, tomorrow. There’s no waiting period,” he said. He looked at her questioningly, unsure if he had gotten the answer right.

To be honest, she wasn’t sure either. It would solve a lot of problems and make a whole bunch more, but they would be married—well, if he was right about all the logistics. He was pretty good at dealing with complex situations and if Samuel helped him… It was probably a viable option. She leaned forward to touch the paper. It was just regular printer paper, not the shiny, heavier cardstock of boarding passes you printed out at the airport, but it was real. It was a pair of tickets to Paris for a honeymoon. And then she thought what it meant, beyond the wonderful, grand, romantic gesture of it, Edith Piaf swelling in the background.

“But, we talked about this. I mean, we talked about you not just swooping in and spending a bunch of money to fix things, getting me big expensive things when I can’t ever… You can’t just throw money at it, at me and expect to make everything all better,” she said, starting to feel angry. She knew part of the anger was a reaction to the fear she’d just had that he would reject her entirely, but she also felt pretty sure she was in the right. She didn’t want to start their marriage with such… inequality between the two of them. He was supposed to get that by now.

“I know. I know, Mary, but I didn’t buy the tickets. Those are a gift from Caroline and Jamie,” he began but she interrupted him, undeterred.

“Well, the hotel then, a week in Paris, at the last minute?”

“So, here’s the thing, I was talking to your mom and she’s the one who suggested Paris in the first place, she said she and your dad were so happy there, and she arranged everything with her friend Colette. She’s the one who has a B&B, it’s right by the Metro, I forget the arrondisement, and, I think it made your mom happy to set it up. She sounded really happy, Mary. She said you hadn’t asked for anything for the wedding from her and it felt like, I don’t know, maybe she wanted to do more, to give this to you? To us,” he paused. 

“You called my mom? And Caroline?” Mary asked. It wasn’t a bad thing. It just wasn’t a thing she had ever expected. 

“Well, I called your mom. She’s the only person who hates texting me more than you do. But Caroline and I have been texting all day. For what it’s worth, she thinks it a good idea, I mean, she thought you seemed totally stressed about the wedding the last time you talked and she thought this would make you happier. She said you were having a hard time, missing your dad, and trying to plan the wedding without him. Going to Paris, it could be a nice way of sort of being connected with him and your mom-- it was more coherent when she wrote it,” he shrugged. “She offered the tickets, she said they had a zillion frequent flier miles just sitting there. And that you’d always wanted to go to Paris and you never asked for anything. And she said that if you wouldn’t listen to me, you ought to listen to her. Actually, she might have said you better listen to her. She got a little heated, emoji-wise. I saved the text where she says that—she told me to. She’s a bit… bossy,” he replied. He started reaching into the jacket again, ostensibly to take out the phone to show her but she waved it away.

“I believe you, I do, that sounds like Caroline. My dad used to call her Miss Bossyboots. So, you called my mom?” she said, trying to imagine it. Had he still been at the coffee shop working on his case report? Had he conspired with her mother to plan an elopement in those pastel plaid shorts with his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, the way she envisioned David Niven would have sat at a coffee shop if he could have been induced to forgo tea? And her mother? She would have been cleaning up her already neat kitchen, probably trying to consider whether there was enough time to work in her garden before her yoga class or whether she should just have another cup of coffee and leaf through Yankee Magazine. Caroline had gotten her it for her as a joke in her Christmas stocking but it had been an unexpected hit. She knew her mother liked Jed but she couldn’t really see how that conversation could have gone; they’d never talked without her being in the same room. 

“Yeah, your mom is so cool. I mean, I totally see how you didn’t hate her your entire adolescence. She was a little worried when I called, at first, she thought there was something wrong like you broke something, but then she was right with me when I explained my idea. She also said you never asked for anything and she and your dad felt bad you turned down the Brown 8 year med school program because the aid package wasn’t good enough and that was the first time I ever heard that story, you know. She was a little more… circumspect about what colossal assholes my parents are being to you, but I could read between the lines. And I know my parents, they are epic assholes, like Iliad caliber, so I get that she was trying to rein in her mama-bear about how they have been treating you. So, to recap, both your mom and Caroline are backing this elopement. And Ezra,” he explained. The more he talked, the more she was starting to think his plan, well, his and her mom’s and Caroline’s plan, could work. And then, Ezra? 

So, she just said, “And Ezra?” and waited. She was feeling the day now, the near dawn awakening, the hours of deflecting Anne, of dealing with Alice, the tedium interspersed with crisis; she was nearly inclined to shift over and rest her head against his chest as he talked, to let herself be lulled by his baritone and his heartbeat, but they had to see this through to the end and frankly, she was now starting to be fascinated. Who else had he involved?

“I figured I should talk to someone on my side of the family and he is definitely the most reasonable family member I have. He and Allison think it is a brilliant idea, the elopement. I could hear Allison cheering in background. I guess she was not… enthused about how she was going to manage infant twins at our wedding—she said something I couldn’t quite make out about hating silk smocking. They make silk smocks for babies? I didn’t get it. Ezra started making some noise about a wedding present, wanting to arrange for us to stay at a fancy hotel with a view of the Eiffel Tower but I think I convinced him not too. So, I think, if you agree to go,” and here he paused and smiled hopefully, “there might be tickets to the ballet or the Opera or something like that.”

She just looked at him-- like a pair of tickets to the Paris Opera was even on her radar right now as an issue. “Were they even asking you at all about L names, when you said that’s what they were texting you about?” she said with faux-irritation.

“Oh yeah, that was also happening, it was a little distracting. I voted “no” on Lucretia and Leontyne but “yes” to Lucy. I think Allison must have some elaborate plan where she’s wearing Ezra down with these wackaloon names so she can get him to say yes to some name maybe he already vetoed? Either that or we are going to have nieces with some, um, exceptional names. Like, what if he’d said yes to Leontyne? Or last week, she wanted Hepzibah and Tabitha. Maybe she’s deficient in folic acid? From making 2 babies’ worth of neural tubes?” Mary knew Jed enjoyed this, enjoyed thinking about the two baby girls in little matching pink bonnets and how he could be the indulgent uncle who brought lots of presents, even noisy ones, and ice cream. It was also a break from the intensity of their overall conversation.

“Is anyone else involved? I mean, just so I can really grasp this entire master plan and how it’s not just you subverting my whole point about the financial inequality in our relationship as if we are in a romantic comedy where I am Sandra Bullock and you are Hugh Grant or some other handsome, rich but ultimately feckless guy. Because that’s not who I want to marry—I want to marry the smart, goofy doctor who manages not to crash the golf cart and who spent a whole lot of time talking to everyone we love about whether this is really an okay idea after all before he actually bought the tickets,” she replied. She felt him relax then, saw the laugh lines near his eyes and leaned over to give him a soft kiss on the cheek. This also tested the engineering of her silk bodice quite impressively and his tone of voice when he said, “Careful, there, if you really want to hear the rest,” was clearly in response to both the gentle kiss and the dramatically improved view of her décolletage, so she just smirked. It was the rare time she got to smirk like a hot girl given her predilection for LL Bean and Danskos and Nordstrom Rack, so she enjoyed the hell out of it for about two minutes and then sat back again.

“Okay, well, Samuel has spent the entire time since he walked into my hotel room basically helping me organize everything, checking with the courthouse about the license and flights and stuff. He’s like, really wicked smart. I thought I knew, but I didn’t get it before. It’s a little scary. And Aurelia let me into your room so I could get your clothes and get the hotel staff to dry clean your blue dress for tomorrow. And Emma, Emma lent me these and told me to tell you they could be the ‘something borrowed.’” He had reached into his pocket and taken out a little silky bag and deftly poured out Emma’s favorite sapphire cabochon earrings. She thought of Emma insisting Jed take the earrings and how she had told Mary to say yes and how her best friend had spent part of her own wedding day thinking about Mary getting married. So she just folded her hand around the earrings and said, 

“Okay.”

“Really, okay? You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to, we’ll figure something else out, I promise, and you won’t have to do it by yourself. I’ll help more and it’ll be the wedding you want, we want, and not some compromised monstrosity you hate,” he said, all in a rush. God, she loved him, her eager, thoughtful man.

“Jed, it’s really okay. The wedding you planned, that’s the one I want,” she said and leaned forward again to kiss him lightly. But now it had hit him she’d agreed and he returned the kiss exuberantly, passionately. His hands moved to her face to hold her to him and his mouth was hot and sweet on hers. He moaned a little as he tasted her and one hand slipped to her neck, then to cup her full breast. This was dangerous—they were alone in this twilit room on a velvet couch and she could feel how they both wanted him to move above her, for her to lie back like an odalisque and let his hands raise her silk skirt to her waist. The vast majority of her brain suddenly clamored for his hands to part her thighs, to bend her knee so there would be just enough space for him to move against her and she knew it would not be enough to feel the rub of him through his wool suit pants, her pantyhose. In a minute, he would have his cock out and she would have encouraged him to shred the goddamn nylons so she could feel him, one perfect thrust and it would be so easy, she was that wet and he was that hard. She would gasp and he would say, “Mary,” not “Mary Margaret,” because it wouldn’t be playful and relaxed this time. This would be urgent and serious, tender and entirely intimate. She would not want to stifle the cries he pulled from her as he stroked within her, angled just so to touch her clit as he rocked, so skilled in pleasing her, so proud of himself when she couldn’t even utter coherent words other than his name or “more” and if anyone walked in, she wouldn’t care, wouldn’t stop, but she would regret it later, being **that** woman at her best friend’s wedding. She didn’t want to regret anything with him.

So she made a great effort and withdrew, the wrench in her mind, not in the actual gesture which was just a small move from there to not-there, and she said the first thing she could think of that would bridge the onslaught of their consuming lust to the relative decorum of the elopement he proposed, “What about rings? And, wait, we can’t go to Paris, we don’t have our passports, we can’t leave the country.”

He shook his head a little. It wasn’t the head-shake of a no, but more to clear his head from the kiss, to re-equilibrate to the reality where they sat upright on the loveseat and her hem brushed the polished wood floors. “It’s okay, Samuel and I went out to a jeweler today, I have the rings in the room. It’s okay that I got them because I was going to be responsible for that anyway, you said so. And the passports, I brought those with me, they’re in the hotel room safe.”

“Wait a second, why did you bring our passports to go to Virginia? Please tell me you haven’t started watching all the old X-Files again when I am on-call, we are not going to need to flee to Amsterdam or Budapest or Jakarta. And while I could arguably be Scully, you are so not Mulder,” she said. There was really no good explanation for their passports to be sitting in the hotel room safe. She thought Samuel might have tactfully pointed out that as long as Jed had brought them, they should be safely stored. She and Samuel had figured out they were simpatico yet completely without any attraction to each other within 2 days of being on service as residents. Ever since, she’d always breathed a sigh of relief when she saw his email address in a list announcing all the details of a new rotation. Now, the new rotation was her elopement.

“You’re definitely marrying me tomorrow morning, right?” Jed asked. She nodded, bemused, waiting for the next disclosure. “Okay, well then. I’ll admit I was planning on whisking you away after this wedding. I was not very, hmmm, what’s the word, ‘taken’ with the plan for catching up on all the chores during the ‘staycation.’ It’s been like 40 degrees max in Boston for 8 straight weeks and I wanted to take you somewhere warm where we could just lie around and not catch up on anything but sleep and books and sex. Okay, and fresh seafood,” he said, giving her a look that was approximately 37% repentant.

“So, for the sake of argument, what was your plan?” she asked. It was almost more fun to get him to share the island fantasy than to enact it, especially since she would always prefer Europe, which she was evidently getting within 48 hours.

“Curaçao,” Jed answered promptly. “Because it has that Dutch colonial heritage thing going on, I thought you’d like that, and you could have a bunch of crazy blue cocktails that I would have literally zero desire to drink but you’d still get a kick out of them,” he said, frontloading the explanation with all the most sympathetic facts.

“And, I suspect that’s not all, so do go on,” she added. She could hear music from the other room. It was a jazz standard, maybe Porter, not minor enough for Gershwin or Kern-- “Summertime?”

“Fine. I found a hotel where all the rooms have private balconies. All I wanted was you on a balcony in your blue bikini, so I could come up behind you and untie the strings on the top. I wanted you in the sunshine for a few days, I wanted you naked on a balcony… and I wanted to hear you laugh and hear the ocean at the same time,” Jed said, his voice holding the heat of the image he’d invoked, the sun on her bare breasts, his hands sliding down her belly, the scent of coconut oil. She would have laughed as the rough curls on his chest tickled her back, at the nonsense he would be murmuring to her, random lines from The Tempest “since it’s set on an island” or explanations of chess gambits, at their mutual sigh of satisfaction as he let his hands reach below the bikini bottom and the wind blew the sound away, first the laughter and then the sighs. 

“It sounds lovely, but wouldn’t it have been the ballet tickets all over again?” Mary asked. She couldn’t muster much irritation; he hadn’t actually done it and the fantasy was such a nice one even if he would have substituted regaling her with the complex storylines of the Marvel universe or fly tying for the Shakespeare and chess. Jed’s hands and coconut oil pretty much trumped any irritation.

“It was going to be my birthday present,” he offered, waiting to see if he could get away with it. 

“Jedediah Thurmond Foster! Your birthday is August 25th!” she retorted.

“Oh, well. I guess it’s good I didn’t buy the tickets, just packed the passports and the bikini,” he laughed.

“So everything is organized? For tomorrow, I just have to show up?” Mary said. Could it be that easy, when all was said and done?

“Not even that, I’ll make sure you get there. I moved all your things to my room already, so after this is over or whenever we decide to leave, I’ll drive you back to the hotel and do whatever else you want, ahem, and then we’ll just have to go to courthouse to get the license in the morning. It’s the one Saturday they’re open this month so we lucked out there. Samuel and Aurelia and Clay said they would meet us here, in the gazebo if you like—yes, I checked with Alex, it’s not a big deal, they don’t have anything else scheduled. She also helped me line up someone for the ceremony. Then we can still head over to the after-wedding brunch at the Greens’ if you want or just wander around the city for a few hours before we have to get to the airport,” he replied.

“For someone who looked terrified I would refuse this plan, you have most of it tucked,” she remarked.

“That was probably 75% Caroline—she was pretty sure you’d agree and she told me to make you call her if you were a little squirrely about it. Samuel and Emma both said some version of ‘if you’re going to do it, do it.’ Emma was a little more diplomatic about it but she also hinted she’d try to put in a good word for me,” he said.

“What about your parents, I mean, your mother has very strong feelings about all of this,” Mary ventured. She was nearly there in the confidence that this was the best way to go department, but she didn’t want to feel like she had just glossed over something as important and un-glossable as Jed’s parents.

“Mary. I’m 36 years old. I’ve got multiple advanced degrees. I’m a grown-up. My parents, frankly, I couldn’t give a shit about what they think. I already had a big, expensive wedding partly to please them and because I still bought into some of their inane ideas about who to marry-- and the marriage was crap. Eliza was a nice woman I should’ve just dated and that’s it. But I caved then and I’m not going to do it again. I’m not going to let them try to browbeat you into a wedding you don’t want. I think eloping and avoiding them is actually the only thing that’s going to make it possible for me to keep seeing them at the holidays, honestly. They’re just, they’re where I came from, but they’re not who I am, I don’t want any of it. I just want you and I want a family that we make—and it can have Ezra and Allison and the babies in it and Caroline and Jamie and your mom. Maybe a freaking miracle will occur and my parents will develop some compassion and an interest that isn’t golf or yachting, but I doubt it. I’m done watching you try like hell to please my mother and watching her just dismiss you because you weren’t a deb, you didn’t go to Miss Porter’s or an Ivy. She’s a small woman. I’m not going to let her ruin anything that really means something to us,” he finished firmly.

She couldn’t think of any other argument they had to explore, any other reason it wasn’t a good idea, the best idea for them. Sure, she’d miss having her mother see her in a white dress and veil, but that scenario came with too many strings and she couldn’t say she felt gipped, Jed’s second wife only getting an elopement and not a humungous celebration when a) that wasn’t what either of them ever wanted and b) the elopement and trip to Paris felt so much more romantic and like the dream her seventeen year old self would have had coming true.

“I think we’re done then,” she said.

“You’re sure? We can not be done if that’s what you need. We can not be done this whole reception,” he said seriously.

“Um, while I deeply appreciate that, I think it would be poor form to miss the entire reception and really, Jed, it’s okay,” she replied. There was a light knock on the door as she said “okay” and they both looked up. Samuel, apparently channeling Idris Elba in an exquisitely cut dark suit, opened the door a little but without stepping in, looked directly at her and said,

“Mary, everything all right?”

And it was.

Everything was all right the whole rest of the night. Jed barely left her side. Just knowing he was standing beside her or sitting, relaxed in his chair with his arm draped over hers, was its own pleasure. Emma and Henry were at the bride’s table with their parents and their siblings, but as a bridesmaid, Mary was in fairly close proximity and it was enough to see Emma so happy and Henry too; he kept looking at her with an expression of total contentment. Jed’s gaze was similar but his eyes held more wry amusement. Samuel and Aurelia were also seated with them, with their respective dates, and Mary was only sad that she couldn’t figure out another scenario where she’d get to sit with this same group of people. Clay turned out to be very funny and he and Aurelia had an endless number of crazy high school stories to share; the lack of HIPAA widened the scope. Samuel’s date, Isabella, had just gotten back after teaching English abroad for a few years, mostly in Asia. She was more than willing to tell them any number of times that she’d had some sort of cross-cultural dilemma; Mary appreciated that Isabella was sure to present herself as the clueless American even though she thought the other woman had probably behaved with far more poise and composure than the vast majority of US citizens. It went without saying that Isabella, chic in a bob and turquoise statement necklace, could never have worn a fanny-pack and so deserved kudos for helping to dismantle that world-wide expectation of Americans abroad. The meal was much better than the rehearsal dinner; they’d clearly gone with the locally-sourced, artisanal caterer but it was worth it to avoid overcooked salmon or chicken with Frenchified mystery sauce. Jed caught her eye and nudged his plate over so she could finish the last of his duck and armagnac sausage though he wisely stopped short of trying to feed it to her himself. They were all generally basking in the glow of a good meal among friends when the version of all right shifted from the predictable wind-down of a wedding movie to the crazed-weasel insanity that could only mean the magic spell had worn off both Anne and Byron. Mary stayed relaxed though as Jed was sitting right next to her for this installment and she and Aurelia had already survived Anne without reinforcements.

Mary didn’t see who had acted as Anne’s accomplice, perhaps Byron though more likely she had suborned an unwitting older relative or one of the cute little cousins in seersucker blazers, but somehow, before Emma and Henry had had their first dance together or any of the other traditional combinations, Anne had positioned herself in the center of the dance floor and began doing a solo, Twyla Tharp-esque interpretation of the chicken dance. There was no spotlight on her but Anne danced as if there were. Mary and Aurelia took it in stride, but Samuel and Clay watched the way you’d watch a black mamba and Isabella had clapped a hand over her mouth; evidently, Anne’s performance was more provocative and horrifying than eating giant deep-fried spiders from a street stall in Yangzhou. Jed was made of sterner stuff; he only started laughing uncontrollably till tears came to his eyes. The band was doing a pretty impressive job considering they had no accordion so only their table could hear Jed’s hoots and guffaws but the entire reception could see Anne. Mary was at least relieved she hadn’t had to sew Anne into her dress or the chicken dance might have been transformed into a rejected Gypsy Rose Lee burlesque number.

Mary knew Mrs. Green must be having her version of a conniption fit, even more so when Byron tried to join Anne and segue into the most bizarre tango she had ever seen, complete with a pink tulip from the table arrangement protruding from his clenched teeth. She thought she saw the end of the green stem, more fragile than a rose’s, fly out of his mouth during one particularly athletic dip; she hoped it hadn’t gotten anyone in the eye. Henry’s two brothers finally managed to surround and contain Anne and Byron and escort them to the sidelines so Emma and Henry could try to reboot the wedding with a properly executed foxtrot to “All the Things You Are.” Jed was happy to dance for a while, holding Mary close. Tonight he only hummed to the music. Any salacious commentary had been leached from him at least temporarily and all that was left was tender and affectionate. All was sweetness and light, the cake was cut and nibbled at, underwhelming as most wedding cake was but Henry had pushed for buttercream over fondant, so it was a real cake and not a sculpture, when Emma agreed to do the bouquet toss. 

There had been a brief kerfuffle 15 minutes earlier while cake was still being consumed when Anne had volunteered to be some sort of proxy for Emma in the garter removal. Emma had very clearly stated from the get-go she was not going to participate in anything that reeked so much of the patriarchy. Her mother must have at least felt that garters were indecorous, so she didn’t push back. Anne, whose connection to etiquette, societal expectations, and this universe’s reality was tenuous, was loudly insistent and ready to embrace the patriarchy with her arms, legs and any piece of herself she could wrap around it, like a female octopus strangling her partner after mating. Anne had gone so far as to bare her right leg nearly to the Spanx-line and display the rhinestone encrusted garter available to Henry or any “likely lad, you there, don’t be shy! It’s tradition!” 

Jed had turned to Mary then and said, “Is she for real? I mean, is she high or something?” Mary shrugged—who knew what Anne had added to her coffee cup all day? “I don’t even know what cluster a psychiatrist would call her, she’s like a shape shifter on meth. Was she dropped on her head as a baby?” Jed went on.

“She’s been like this all day. All. Day.” Mary replied. Aurelia heard her and nodded.

“It’s true. She was like this even before Mary had to help her get out of Alice’s dress and she never lost consciousness then, so I don’t think it can be blamed on that. Although, I don’t know how many Xanax Jane Green offered her—she was dumping them out like Tic-Tacs,” Aurelia added and nodded sagely.

“This is rapidly becoming the most memorable wedding reception I have ever been to,” Samuel said. “I can’t say it’s a good thing.”

“Wait, I’m still stuck on Mary having to help Anne out of Alice’s dress,” Jed said. In her head, Mary did a quick rewind of the afternoon’s events and was pretty sure there would be no easy way to summarize the experience. There had been so much yelping but it had alternated between British and Ohio so quickly. And there had been that moment when she’d been afraid Anne would emerge from the front of the dress, like the chestburster in Alien. She looked at Aurelia and made a weak hand gesture of “What can I say?”

“I don’t really know any of the people here, so I wasn’t going to say anything, but how did that woman end up in someone else’s dress?” Clay asked.

“And why couldn’t she get out by herself?” Jed added. He asked it like it was a real question, like how to resolve the Middle East crisis or why they ever made Back to the Future 2 and 3, rather than the absurd inquiry it was about a whole bunch of chiffon and an ego as big as all outdoors.

“All I can say is, compared to what you are seeing now, a) that seemed like a totally reasonable error anyone could make and b) you really don’t want to know,” Mary said finally, after discarding several other, longer and more convoluted but ultimately likely insufficient explanations.

“I think that guy is taking the garter off with his teeth. The one in the red cowboy boots. He tried to sell me this FitBit knock-off he called a FatBite when we were in the receiving line. Wow, that lady Anne, she looks really… happy?” Isabella remarked. 

Indeed, Byron had stepped up to the challenge and was clearly engaging in a running commentary while he proceeded though blessedly, they couldn’t hear a word. Mary peered over to where Emma was, concerned that she was getting upset about the unexpected direction her reception was taking. She was relieved to see Emma and Henry both laughing and pointing at the spectacle. Anne and Byron did give the wedding a certain je ne sais quoi. Mary spied Alice with her phone out and knew what would be gracing her Instagram feed within the next few minutes, even without a filter. Jane’s father appeared to be whispering something to her mother as they sat at the bride’s table and Mary saw Jane take a hefty slug of her drink before resetting her face to “serene hostess;” Mary would have guessed the glass held white wine except for the tightening of Jane’s mouth, which Mary could make out even at a distance. Jane had moved onto the hard stuff, probably Scotch or bourbon. It was evidently enough to help her spring into action when they all heard Anne’s voice ring out.

“Byron, you naughty boy! This isn’t Twilight—no nibbles!” Mary thought Anne could not have sounded more delighted and considered it was generous of Jane Green to give her the beat before interceding like a high school principal breaking up a fight. Just then, Byron had secured the garter and thrust his fist with the rhinestone bedazzled cloth straight up in the air, as if he had rescued it from certain death or was now declaring Anne’s leg a free and sovereign nation. Anne tittered, the loudest titter Mary thought was actually possible, and they slunk off for a while to a shadowy corner. It seemed the less said about them the better, a lesson learned from Beetlejuice.

There was another lull, a brief one, with more dancing. She and Jed sat down after a few songs. Her high heels were starting to really hurt and Jed’s shoulder looked even more enticing when she was sitting down. They had the table to themselves and he was idly playing with his coffee cup, letting the last swallow sit in the well of the cup. She thought he would rather be toying with her hair but was trying to remain appropriate. She was personally losing interest in being appropriate and was wondering how soon they could leave. It would be her call and it was Emma’s wedding, so she didn’t want to jump the gun.

“Just say when, Mary. The car is valeted, you can even take off the heels now if you want,” Jed said. He’d leaned over and she thought how much she wanted to just be lying in the big white hotel bed already, her face clean of all the make-up, her head on his chest.

“I think Emma’s going to toss the bouquet soon. We should stay for that, then we can leave. She’ll understand we don’t need to close the place down,” Mary replied.

“Okay, whatever you want,” he said and gave her a lazy smile like it was already Sunday morning in Paris and he was her husband.

Alice, for once acting like the maid of honor, spent the next 10 minutes managing to corral all the single women together into a brightly colored flock and then directed Emma to the front for a prime pitching position. Mary stood off to one side; she needed to be in the group, but she wasn’t invested in catching the bouquet itself. Jed had walked over with her and was leaning against the wall next to Samuel, waiting for this one last part to be done so they could leave. Anne was front and center, nearly elbowing out Alice and Isabella. Aurelia also stood a ways back after sharing a look with Mary that anticipated some fresh hell, originating from Anne.

In retrospect, Mary should have expected it. What would be the crowning touch to the day? But honestly, she was tired and her feet hurt. She just wanted to sit in the passenger seat of a rental Passat and then be cajoled into a clean, quiet hotel suite and let Jed take down her hair and unzip her dress. So, when Anne leapt into the air like an outtake from A League of Their Own, her hand hyperextended to catch the bouquet, and then managed to get clocked with said bouquet and went down, her dress still retaining integrity, Mary gasped aloud. Everyone sprang back from Anne, who was strangely contorted on the polished floor with her hand still clutching most of the bouquet; it was like watching vinegar flee oil making a vinaigrette. Mary could hear Anne congratulating herself for her success “well done, Anne, just tip-top!”

It was the doctor in her. Mary couldn’t turn it off on the airplane or when she saw a little kid riding a bike without a helmet and she couldn’t turn it off now, even though she was far from the only physician in the room. She started walking over to Anne when she felt Jed take her arm.

“She’s okay, Mary, you’re not on call,” he said, tugging at her elbow.

“But, her head, it’s just, maybe the bouquet hit her head?” Mary said. She didn’t wish the woman ill, or rather, she didn’t much now though there were moments earlier in the day when she might have tried to beat Anne senseless with a truckload of peonies. Or 2x4s. Anne had been pretty miserable to her but now happiness and pity had softened the blows.

“Mary, I’m a neurologist. She didn’t get a concussion from a bouquet of peonies,” Jed said firmly. 

“If you’re sure…” she said, trailing off a little, since she recognized how completely inane she sounded.

“I am sure. Like, sun-going-to-rise-in-the-East sure,” he answered. 

And then Georgia caught sight of them and took the picture that was in the other half of the chased silver frame. She also showed it in a gallery “the only wedding picture I’ve ever done that with, but if it’s okay with you, I just think it turned out so well.” Jed had picked up a peony that had gotten separated from its sisters and offered it to Mary; he’d been looking at her with such loving devotion and satisfied amusement she couldn’t help but smile back at him the same way she would have after a long night of lovemaking. It was a moment of pure intimacy, but Georgia managed to take the picture in a way that didn’t intrude, only rejoiced to catch a little of the exchange. She left it black and white which somehow captured the Vermeer quality of the light better. It was Mary’s favorite picture, precious in a different way than the flimsy ultrasounds they’d end up accumulating and the shot Jed took of her in the antique rocking chair, nursing Matthew, or Jed captain of their little sailboat, the Robin, his young crew all securely life-jacketed in Yale blue.

It was a perfect picture. And thankfully, there was no way to know that a moment later, Anne’s voice had pealed out like a siren, beseeching Byron “Save me! You’re my only hope!” in a real travesty of Princess Leia’s voice until finally Aurelia had squelched her, “ _Bastante_! You’re done, walk it off,” and had led her from the reception like a coach removing a pitcher, far too late in the game.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter was kind of long but I didn't really want to break it. There were oodles of other directions I could have gone but I already went oodles of directions (aka tangents) so we'll have to live with not hearing much from Henry or Alice. There are 80 squintillion pop culture references but Aurelia's Portuguese exclamations are about what you would think from context. I hope I covered most of what I had set the story up to do. This was the original last chapter but I'm strongly considering at least a check-in at the B&B in Paris...


	5. An American/April in Paris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cue Etta James singing "At Last" for a honeymoon in Paris.

They didn’t make love when they got back to the hotel. Neither one of them was 23 anymore, not even close, and Mary had managed to resign herself to her earlier fantasies remaining just that as the various departments of her brain turned off the light and locked the door. She’d had been basically half-conscious during the drive back to the hotel but it was a nice kind of half-conscious, listening to Jed hum along to the jazz the local NPR was playing because it was after 10 pm. Her heels sat abandoned in the foot well and she didn’t think she’d be able to jam them back on, but Jed had planned to valet the car at the hotel and it wasn’t that big a deal to ruin the CVS pantyhose walking from the car to the elevator. Jed had shepherded her to his room, holding her heels in one hand and letting the other rest at her waist. She was not a huge fan of PDA but this was more like getting a drunk into a cab, including the soft “hey, hey” Jed had to utter as she nearly collided with corners that seemed to approach far too rapidly or when she nearly slithered to the polished floor of the elevator.

“Sweetheart, are you okay?” he said when he’d gathered her in his arms in the elevator. She’d laid her head on his shoulder and watched the floor buttons light up.

“Yeah, just so tired,” she mumbled back, too tired to even smile as she felt him stroke her back and pull her a little closer.

“Just a few more minutes then, and you’ll be in bed and you can go right to sleep,” he replied. She was pretty sure he was glossing over changing for bed and she still recalled the way desire had flared between them on that couch although for the life of her, she couldn’t seem to feel much besides the quicksand of overwhelming fatigue. Still, she’d make an effort.

“I thought we were going to…” she trailed off in a yawn and he chuckled.

“Mary sweetheart, nothing’s happening tonight except getting you ready for bed and then sleeping. There’ll be time in the morning, when you’re awake, when you can enjoy it, we can enjoy it,” he said.

She had, well, not quite a burst of energy, when they got to the room, but enough to negotiate undressing and showering. It might have had something to do with the impromptu head massage Jed gave her as he removed the roughly 82,000 bobby pins from her hair; he’d removed her jeweled pin first and had paused, as if he’d imagined it was holding the entire updo together, which she’d gleaned from the little, disappointed “Oh!” he let out when absolutely nothing happened. He’d paused a second time to get one of the hotel’s glasses to collect the pins in when it became apparent there were more than 3. She sat at the vanity, a suite upgrade, feeling like she had moved to somewhere more primitive on the spectrum between invertebrate and vertebrate, and passively enjoyed glancing at Jed working behind her in the mirror’s reflection. He’d done the best he could to unravel her hair after the pins were gone, but the Aveda hairspray was still acting like lacquer and he didn’t make much headway; he converted the attempt to the massage but had stopped when she’d moaned a little, bending down to her ear to say, 

“Enough of that. I still say you’re too tired. Do you need me to help you wash your hair or will it be faster if you do it yourself? No funny business though, miss.”

Neither one of them really bought acupuncture or chiropractors (well, Jed had quite a bit to say about chiropractors and neck injuries, none of it positive), but it seemed like his hands on her had done something and now she was awake enough to assess her choices. It probably would be faster to wash her hair herself; she could deal with the make-up in the shower as well and then go to bed clean, if not completely dry. She drew the line at blow-drying her hair at 11 pm. It would be a curly, tangled mess in the morning, but she didn’t have cowlicks and she knew Jed liked it wild. She could tame it before they left the hotel though she intended to forgo bobby pins if it was humanly possible.

She enjoyed the large, marble shower with its generous bench and copious assortment of gels and soaps as much as she could without Jed’s enthusiastic company. She stuck with her regular facial cleanser, unwilling to risk any reaction to hibiscus-linden-lime or geranium-willow-apricot or any of the other multifactorial and ostensibly organic (as if that alone promised safety; there was plenty of organic cyanide in organic apricot pits and you could still end up organically dead) products lining the inset niche with its neutral Moroccan tile inlay. The towels were lovely, thick and very soft, and Jed had thoughtfully hung her nightgown on the hook beside the hotel’s lush bathrobe. She remembered how surprised he’d been to learn she preferred long, old-fashioned nightgowns, cotton in the summer, flannel for winter over the more usual college tee-shirts or cute pajama sets. She’d told him how she and Caroline had always been given a new nightgown and slippers every Christmas Eve and he’d bought her three new ones that same week. When she pressed him, he’d said,

“I just can’t always think about little Mary Margaret on Christmas Eve when I see you in bed. In our bed, the cognitive dissonance is too creepy. So, I got some new ones that don’t have that… resonance. If you don’t like them, we can return them.”

It was one time she hadn’t taken him to task for over-spending because their mutual sexual comfort was important and also, she really loved the nightgowns, cotton batiste trimmed with narrow ribbon, a fine ruffle at the hem. When three slinkier numbers that looked suspiciously like Eileen Fisher’s colossally overpriced winter collection appeared that November in her pajama drawer, she had just incorporated them into the rotation. Tonight, it was one of the virginal white cotton nightgowns, with a little embroidery on the straps and she winced a little at the floating cloud cliché in her interior monologue supplied when she pulled it on but it had been a very long day. Jed was waiting for her in the bed when she stepped out of the bathroom; he’d made an extremely quick visit before her lengthier shower and she had squelched the nagging question of why that was not a regular occurrence at home and tried to stay in a warmer, gentler, fuzzier head-space.

As she’d slid into the bed, the high thread count offsetting any thoughts of the commercial laundry the hotel must use, it had taken some effort to draw close to him. There was only the lamp on his bedside table on and it had a dimmer it seemed, because it was only a very soft, very small puddle of gold poured over Jed’s bare chest, the line of his forearm, the plump pillow next to him. The bed had sizable acreage, probably a California King; it seemed massive compared to their bed at home and she shivered, just a little, before she felt his arm around her.

“I might get lost in here,” she said, pulling up her knees a little. He slid closer, his chest to her back, his knees tucked in the crook hers left for him.

“I’ll find you, Mary. I’ll always find you,” he said, very softly but with complete conviction. Her last conscious thought was that he had meant to make it a joke, but he couldn’t and it wasn’t.

When she woke up, the room was bright even though the curtains were drawn. She had been so deeply asleep she’d forgotten the day, where they were, what lay ahead; she knew only that she was Mary and Jed was beside her. She blinked and stretched and she heard him chuckle a little.

“What time is it? It is late? It feels really late,” she said, sort of alert. Was “alert” something you could sort of be? She thought not—it probably fell in the category of “pregnant” and “unique,” states which were supposed to be unmodifiable.

“Well, it depends on your context, I guess. Because it’s about 7:15, which is not late for a lot of people, in fact, for every college student, it’s criminally early, but for Mary Phinney-on-service, it’s almost tomorrow. But, you are Mary Phinney-on-vacation, so I would say, it’s just about right,” he said. He soundly substantially more awake than she was and she revised what he had just said to include him—it was quite late, even for Jedediah Foster-on-vacation, who had some sort of internal clock like a turkey thermometer that just popped every day at 6:30 am at the latest. 

She was fudging. It was usually 5:45 am and she was counting on this helping them both out when (and not if, she was trying to use positive self-talk on this one) there was a newborn to wrangle in the Phinney-Foster household. She had imagined sleeping a little later to make up for the 3 am feeding and letting him bring a small, demanding someone to their bed, drifting towards consciousness while he regaled her about what they (a plural, one beautifully disheveled husband and one very soft boy-or-girl baby in a gender neutral terry-cloth sleeper with a turtle on it) had heard on NPR already or who had won the game that went into extra innings the night before.

“Hmmm, 7:15. And I’m not doing rounds, or answering a page, or waiting for the coffee to perk while I read the Times,” she mused.

“Well, you won’t read the Globe, which is on you. I didn’t force you to subscribe to the New York Times, you were already doing that. But no, you are still in bed and you seem to have all your faculties,” Jed replied.

“‘All my faculties?’ And you call yourself a neurologist?” she retorted.

“Not right now I don’t.” His voice was low, even lower than his usual baritone, from the night and his… intentions. Right now, his intentions included a very large, warm hand on her hip where her nightgown was a very thin batiste barrier. She liked all his intentions very much.

“Do you need to…” He tilted his head towards the bathroom, indicating everything that fell under the umbrella of “morning ablutions.” He seemed fresh as a daisy himself and she raised one eyebrow. Because she was curious and because she could and because she knew it drove him crazy.

“I’ve been up for a while… it’s surprisingly fun to watch you sleep while also contemplating ravishing you and thinking about Paris.”

“Let me take 5 minutes and we can resume this… conversation,” she said. There was fiction and there was reality. In real life, she preferred to make love with a clean mouth and empty bladder. She had already done away with the delays condoms offered by getting a Mirena, which she blessed every month and which also was preventing her from giving in to the impressively compelling drive to try for a honeymoon baby. But there were limits—neither one of them had returned from a war or survived some critical illness or injury, so brushing her teeth was a must.

“Is it too clichéd if I say, don’t take too long?” Jed asked, lying on his side and patting the spot she had just vacated suggestively and also comically.

“Yes, but it’s okay. I won’t hold it against you—this whole weekend has been such a tease,” she said, walking to the bathroom. She hoped her pace didn’t appear brisk, because that was really not very romantic, but she didn’t feel she’d really mastered sinuous or seductive trailing. Her plan was to have rendered these issues obsolete in under 5 minutes by returning with Crest minty breath and a non-grimy face. She’d check on the hair; it felt like it fell into the “heroine unleashed” category and not unkempt hobo-woman but the mirror would say for sure. 

She made it out in 3 minutes, in part because she’d been right about the hair. She tried to get back in the bed in a way that suggested Sophia Loren or Ingrid Bergman (not playing a nun) but it was immaterial; once both her feet were off the floor, Jed was upon her and he mostly wasn’t playing. There was nothing frenzied about it—she just knew she was completely and utterly his entire focus and it felt good. Very, very good. He held her face in his hands and kissed her mouth so gently and for such a long time she was not sure if she could bear him to go on and then he was suddenly tasting her, licking the little gasps she made into his own mouth while one hand reached to her shoulder and just brushed the strap of her nightgown. It fell down, as she recalled it always did, and then his mouth was there at her shoulder, the curve of her neck, his hand anchoring her at her waist.

“Oh, I love this, beautiful. I’ve been thinking about doing this since I saw you pack this one, it’s my favorite… you know that, don’t you, my beautiful girl,” he murmured in her ear. She felt the familiar retreat into her body, the way her words and thoughts moved away from her as he touched her and she was left with emotion and sensation. Her own hands stroked his back, along his ribs. She reached up to feel the curls at the nape of his nape, traced the shell of his ear and listened for the low hum he made. She’d just barely heard it when he shifted and his hands were under the nightgown, everywhere he touched—her hip, the flare of her waist, his fingers tracing her sternum and then the bold palm that cupped her breast—became the most sensitive. She thought she would sigh with the pleasure of his thumb against her nipple but the sound was an inhalation, the “ah” she had imagined clearly more desire than relief, more demand than appreciation.

“I know, I know you like that, almost as much as my mouth there, you’ll have that too if you want it, you only have to ask… God! you feel so fucking good, how do I ever let you out of my bed?” Jed went on, both hands at her breasts now and she felt her hips rising up to him, she wanted him closer, closest.

“You, you like it in the shower,” she managed, trying to match him a little. She loved the feeling of him laughing against her, the tickle of his chest hair prickling a little through the fine cotton. The nightgown was rapidly losing its appeal, tangling around her and she wriggled, then drew it over her head as quickly as she could, careful not to connect her elbow with his jaw.

“Christ!” he exclaimed at feeling of all of her bare skin against so much of his. She hardly ever wore panties with a nightgown, another plus as far as Jed was concerned. They’d need to get his boxers off in a few minutes but she contented herself with slipping her hands beneath the waistband to feel the firm curve of his ass. He jerked at the touch and she’d parted her legs for him without any thought at all. She moved her thigh against where he was so hard and then he was kissing her again, almost furious, the edge of his teeth barely perceptible amid the heat of his mouth on hers. She held his face against hers, one hand stroking his beard; it was a little rough and it was exactly what she wanted to feel.

“I love you, love you Jedediah, oh God, I want you… can it be now? I want you now,” she cried out, a soft cry as she pressed against him as much as she could, clung to him.

“Yes, sweetheart, yes, you don’t have to wait anymore, let me just--” he crooned in her ear, raising his hips a little to pull the boxers down and off and then he was against her, his cock so full and hard touching her inner thigh until she shifted and had him nearly where she needed.

“Oh, Mary, oh! You’re so wet, Christ, I love you, you’re mine, my Mary,” and then she felt him inside her, not sudden, but confident, seeking, so good that it seemed it couldn’t be any better until he began to move and the slick pleasure was everywhere. She closed her eyes, concentrated on the feeling, their two bodies so familiar and yet there was nothing routine. She felt his hand slide around her thigh and then under, to lift her hips up just a little, but it made all the difference, because now his every stroke caught her clit and she couldn’t make words anymore, just breaths and a low, keening sound that only he’d ever heard. 

“Oh, yes, that’s right, that’s right, my beautiful girl… I want you to come, come for me, love, the next time I take you, you’re going to be my wife, beautiful, my wife, my Mary, oh Jesus!”

She’d opened her eyes as he spoke, if what he was doing could be considering speaking; it seemed like he was in her head and she saw he was looking intently at her face, had probably been looking at her the whole time and that tipped her over. She pulled him closer as she came and there was no more semblance of control or focus. He moved within her, thrusts deep and erratic, his back damp with sweat under her hands.

“Jedediah… sweetheart, mmm… so good, come with me, I want to feel you, this is the last time before you marry me, marry me, oh, oh yes,” she found the wherewithal to say and maybe it was that, or the ankle she hooked over his calf, spreading her legs a little wider as she drew him even closer, but she couldn’t tell because he stroked one more time, roughly, unrestrained and then cried out himself and half-collapsed on her, still remembering how much bigger and heavier he was, making sure she could breathe. 

She liked to run her fingers along the curve of his head as he nestled his face in her neck. She shivered a little as he traced the edge of her breast and then rested his hand where the softness of her belly met the crest of her hipbone. He stayed there for several minutes, not quite dozing, his cock still hard inside her; he knew she liked it that way.

“Mmmm, that was… worth the wait. You were right to stop us at the reception, I’m not sure, no, I wouldn’t have noticed anything else in the middle of that, I definitely couldn’t’ve noticed anything except you,” Jed said. 

He slipped from her and moved to his back, dragging her a little so she was halfway spooned against him and he could let his hand alight anywhere he chose. He didn’t play favorites—his palm landed on the round curve of her bottom just as often as the underside of her breast, or the delicate skin below her belly button. Mary lay quietly, enjoying the second pleasure of having been so well-loved, a general, luxuriously rich ease coupled with the satisfaction of having Jed so clearly and effectively satisfied. She could recognize his similar happiness, the absence of any tension in his body, the cheerful little hum he’d started, maybe “Concorvado” that had been on the radio the night before. He paused though, before reaching “quiet walks by quiet streams,” and said,

“Was that too vanilla? I mean, I have no complaints, zero complaints, but maybe, after all that teasing… Mary?”

She turned over so she could look at his face. Yeah, he was seriously second-guessing some pretty exquisite love-making which had left her feeling more right and content than nearly anything else in recent memory. She supposed she had a lifetime of similar moments to look forward to and smiled to herself.

“No, it was perfect, you were perfect. And I think we need to take back “vanilla.” Vanilla is delicious, real vanilla, not the supermarket crap. Real vanilla is lush and warm and sweet, not like sugar though. There’s a reason everyone likes it. I like it,” she said, pausing to look at his face. The concern had gone and now he was just grinning up at her and her crazy curls. She felt adorable and impish but she wanted to feel a little more Katharine and a little less Audrey. 

“Next time, I’ll sit on your lap and you can say ‘fuck’ a whole lot more when you talk dirty, okay?”

He chuckled as she had intended and squeezed her waist. Before she even had to pay attention to whether either of them had any interest in pursuing her offer, their stomachs growled nearly synchronously and they both laughed.

“Well, it’s past 8. I’m going to read to you from the room service menu and you’ll pick and not even think for a moment about what exorbitant price a cup of juice is, you hear me? Just, I really want to get croissants because I want the basket with all the tiny jars of jam. And the coffee was pretty good yesterday,” Jed said. 

She thought about the cup of coffee, well, the latte she’d had yesterday morning, taken in drags like nursing a bourbon, hoping to make it an antidote against the eddies of chemically scented heat from the dryers and Anne’s sharp voice striking at her like the eagle that gored Prometheus and sighed in pleasure at the contrast; Jed had sat up and she saw the muscles of his back as he twisted to reach for the menu, his bare chest and wonder of wonders! he’d put on his glasses to read the elaborately calligraphied card which listed eggs Benedict and waffles for $17 dollars in a font nearly fractal with curlicues and so now embodied her college fantasy of a sexy professor which was amazingly versatile and had great staying power—the touch of silver in Jed’s beard only enhanced his dreaminess, a far, far cry from every professor she’d ever had, especially the one who’d looked like Herman Munster or the one with the collection of 80s sweater vests.

“Cranberry. And French toast—with extra strawberries and bacon. And whipped cream, but not on the bacon. I am channeling my inner Leslie Knope today,” she said definitively.

“You have an inner Leslie Knope? I guess… you feel more Ann Perkins to me, but I may have underestimated your love of whipped cream and Joe Biden,” he smirked, then looked back at the menu. “They only have local peppered pork belly unless you are willing to try, and I quote, “humanely-raised, uncured, smoked Moulard duck bacon.” Jesus. It’s impossible to read this menu without sounding like the 1 percent-iest person of all time,” he replied.

“Well, it’s fine for a day, I guess. Or for this breakfast. I don’t imagine we’re going to swan around Paris turning up our noses at anything other than Champagne and caviar,” she said, laughing a little as her imagination had draped them both equally with yards of pearls and it was Jed who trailed the feather boa down the street. She hadn’t felt this purely happy for such a long time, she leaned over and kissed the closest part of him she could reach, just above his elbow and he looked down at her, professorially hip in the glasses and fondly doting and said, 

“You’re adorable—I don’t think you’ve ever swanned around anywhere in your entire life. Executive decision-- pork belly and duck bacon, both—you need to make up for yesterday, I’m sure you barely ate anything,” he said. 

He ordered “extra whipped cream and jam and maple syrup,” mouthing “no judgment!” and she thought they might enter a simultaneous diabetic coma until he suggested “we can walk around for a while after the wedding if you wear your flats and not those killer heels.” It was only the prospect of the breakfast arriving under silver domes that kept her from climbing onto his lap and devouring him with kisses for the careful way he said “wedding” and the look in his eyes, glad and excited, as he glanced at her for her approval. Both versions of bacon were very delicious, so she did not regret her decision, at least not very much. And Jed was eager to see if the whipped cream tasted better on her mouth than on top of the French toast, an experiment that required multiple iterations. He was so intent on having an adequate _n_ of sweet, curious, consuming kisses that they were almost late for the ceremony, slightly breathless when they arrived at the white painted gazebo, having broken into the pace they used in the hospital for a code, laughing when the officiant raised an eyebrow not nearly as effectively as Aurelia.

Something happened though between the laughter and the rustling of Mary’s skirt like aspen leaves, for the wedding itself was serious and formal. This was despite the small number of guests, Mary’s lack of a cathedral length veil or either mother pastel-suited in a pew with a matching hat like a the Enterprise’s saucer section festooned with ostrich feathers obscuring the view of everyone around them. The officiant, who had a comfortingly Michelle Obama vibe, including awesomely toned arms, used the most traditional vows as they’d agreed, except that Mary did not promise to obey, and Jed looked at her earnestly when he put the engraved ring on her finger; he could not let her hand go and the kiss they shared was solemn and tender, undisturbed by a coincidental double rainbow or the singing of some regional archetypal bird, by the arrival of any someone who very much could not hold their peace. Aurelia was still and unsmiling when Mary looked at her, very beautiful with tears in her eyes that she had not had for Emma, and Clay was holding her hand lightly in his and beamed at them. Samuel nodded at Mary approvingly, the gesture slight; she knew he would laugh with them later but now it felt right to have his blessing. Mary did not miss a bouquet or a sweeping train, she did not even miss her nephews in matching seersucker suits or the organ’s impressive chords announcing the marriage as they walked out to a pelting with rice or birdseed. She had everything because Jed had known want she wanted and had given it to her gladly and unreservedly. Nothing was a surprise except how familiar it felt, every perfect imperfection, desire subsumed entirely, momentarily, by how much she loved him and was loved.

What followed was a honeymoon full of surprise, a series of wonderful surprises to them both, for them both. Samuel graciously offered to make their excuses at Emma’s official after-wedding brunch and was warned to avoid Byron unless he wanted a set of rainbow compression socks; Mary felt her mouth must have been a comic-book “o” of shock when Samuel said he had someone in mind for the socks and would have to make Byron’s acquaintance. She narrowed her eyes at Jed as they were upgraded to first class on the flight to Paris and he made the flight attendant put her hand on a picture of the Bible he uploaded to his iPhone screen so she could take an oath that he’d had nothing to do with it; it only took a few seconds of his puppy-dog look to convince Colleen and Mary congratulated herself that she could have held out longer. He did admit a few hours into the flight, mellowed by a hot towel and a warmed up cookie, to sneaking a few half-sized Pringles tubes (just the size of the pneumatic tubes the strapped community hospital still relied on to send orders and meds around like some sort of discarded, crazed, Willy Wonka machination sans everlasting Gobstoppers) to the desperate mother traveling with a Maya-wrapped baby and four year old twins, just beyond the first class curtain; the Pringles and their cans acted as the anticipated distraction and soporific and Mary supposed the entire plan was appreciative of Jed’s petty larceny. 

Mary had thought she’d love the Louvre the best but it was the sculpture garden at the Musée Rodin that she did not want to leave, walking hand in hand with Jed when they entered and as the day went on, running down the gravel paths, playing hide-and-seek behind the figures, happy to lose and be found and let Jed win another kiss; there were not that many other people there but those that were only smiled at them benevolently, not even bothering to sigh “ _Ah, l’amour!_ ” like Maurice Chevalier would have been compelled to do before he tipped his boater to a suitable raffish angle and ambled out. She actually bought the stunning champagne and black sequined vintage dress the shop girl said was from 1923 that they found while wandering around after Jed teased her mercilessly for “forgetting your Baedeker, Lucy Honeychurch! Do you mean to buy some postcards too?” She had her own back when she asked him to help fasten it before they left for the ballet and explained, in her most innocent, Mary Margaret voice, that she couldn’t wear a bra with a dress like that; she felt his mouth sudden and hot on the nape of her neck, her bare back while his hands slipped carefully beneath the gaping sides of the heavily beaded, gleaming silk to cup her breasts, hands that were not careful at all, possessive and cherishing. They were late to the performance and she didn’t care, another anomaly like the retro but decidedly non-vintage garter belt and silk stockings she did wear, at least for the duration of the ballet.

It wasn’t that Jed bought the bundle of Tintin comics they found in a stall beside the Seine, the light so perfect Mary could hear “April in Paris” as if it were directly piped into her parietal lobe; it was when he turned to her and told her he wanted to frame one, she could choose though he preferred “The Black Island,” for a nursery. It was the tenderness in his expression more than the throngs of stylish Parisians that transformed the shocking, beautifully carnal urge she had to fuck in an adjacent alley into a dreamy, adoring desire to hold him, to put her arm around his waist and drift down the riverbank like Jerry and Lise in “American in Paris.” She confessed what she had first considered once they were in sight of the B&B and he just managed to keep it together until they’d closed the door to their room and she’d set the paper bag with the neatly wrapped comics on the aptly occasional table before he said in a low, intense voice, “We’re not going back out tonight and I don’t want you wearing anything except the sheet.” Dragons Elysées was on par with any mediocre Chinese place in the North End and they delivered so it became another pearl of a night. She discovered Jed could be very considerate of Colette’s linens, careful about not getting duck sauce anywhere he couldn’t easily, happily clean it up and Mary found she did not mind being favorably compared to dim sum, at least not by a naked and enthusiastic husband.

She knew the honeymoon was a time apart, all sorts of lazy hours made up of crêpes and Kouign-amann, Édith Piaf and the Eiffel Tower all lit up, a glorious cliché she couldn’t help being moved by, grey cobblestones and effortless loveliness of plane trees, but she wasn’t concerned it wouldn’t last, they would always have Paris. She wasn’t even in any particular rush when they had to pack, hadn’t bothered to make a list and was rifling aimlessly through the suitcase as Jed methodically picked up all the scattered pieces of the little life they’d had in the B&B when she found the beret, tucked just above her nightgowns. She hadn’t bought it—the color was a bit brash, an aniline shade that would have been called dahlia in the 1890s but was probably going to merit something like plum or pomegranate now. It could only suit an exquisite blonde Scandinavian model, on whom it could only contextualize icily symmetric perfection, or a spunky over-60 year old woman who wanted something a little edgy for her Red Hat Society membership. On anyone else, it was going to be an eyesore.

“That’s not for you, you know,” Jed called out from the bathroom, having glanced at her over her shoulder.

“Thank god. Well, who is it for? I don’t think it’s quite your color,” she replied.

“Remember how you gave me your phone the other day? When you were trying on your new dress?” he asked, walking back into the room and smiling at her, lying on the bed in panties and his Black Dog tee-shirt, balancing the hat on one finger like a Harlem Globetrotter or a juggler preparing to spin her twentieth plate, “Your phone went crazy, you should have seen the look that saleslady gave me, the uncouth American, it’s a good thing you bought the dress. You got like 27 texts in 30 seconds and it wasn’t on vibrate-- and they were all from that Anne Hastings, asking you to get her a raspberry beret. I didn’t think you were that close,” he said as Mary choked out a laugh.

“I didn’t either. We’re not. Except for when I had to help her get out of Alice’s dress, that was like a game of Twister, a bad, bad game. So, should I be worried you are buying a hat for another woman on our honeymoon?”

“It’s just, a few of the texts were these weird emoji combinations, like if the Kama Sutra and Asterix were in a Vitamix, and there, there were some other random Prince lyrics and… I could hear you in there, undressing, I had to distract myself so I looked around the shop and there was a raspberry beret and it was a second-hand store. So I bought it. I know I’m supposed to be a scientist and all that shit, but it felt like a message from the universe,” he said, his tone a mixture of sheepish and confused, with a dollop of flat-out crazy at peering into the abyss, which was a strong indication that Anne Hastings had been at work. It was entirely possible Mary would have to change her number when they got back home and certainly her ring-tone which was a bummer because she really liked Clair de Lune.

“A raspberry-beret-message? What could it mean?” she mused. 

“I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that. I don’t really want to ever text that woman and I can’t think you do either, maybe Emma can arrange to get the beret to her? She wants it badly enough,” he said. She took pity on him and nodded.

“You look incredibly relieved… she texted you ‘Little Red Corvette,’ didn’t she? All of it,” Mary said, confident with her crash course in Advanced Anne Hastings that she had solved this latest puzzle, surprised when Jed came over, shoved the suitcase off the bed and climbed right on top of her, kissing her deeply, stealing a hand to her bottom to squeeze her, then breaking the kiss to say, “You are my favorite person in the whole world, please stay married to me forever and we can just pretend Prince only wrote Purple Rain, from now on. The bonus is we never have to deal with the whole Artist Formerly Known As Prince symbol.” 

She kissed him back to agree because what else could she do? She’d just have to be patient and they could reclaim 1999 because damned if Anne was taking that from her cardio playlist. She could look forward to Emma’s lengthy explanation of Anne’s latest shenanigans, a lifetime of them, Henry leaning back from the table with his long legs equally elegant in basketball shorts or the suit he wore for all-school Silent Meeting, Jed’s warm laughter from the kitchen where he was making two batches of coffee, one decaf, both French press, the smiles she would receive for jumping for her pager every time the washer timer went off, countless pictures on Emma’s phone from the last holiday Anne and Byron had descended upon, the raspberry beret nearly always somehow present, like Waldo, a gift that kept on giving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it-- the final chapter of this story. I tried to incorporate as many Parisian references as possible, though I did miss Madeline. There are also many pop culture references and a final bizarre outing with Anne Hastings, but I gave Jed and Mary the happiest ending I could imagine and I hope you have enjoyed reading this!

**Author's Note:**

> So, I hope this has been an enjoyable foray into the modern world for our Mercy Street denizens. I'm not going to include a lot of notes, but I have tried to make everything pretty realistic even if I had to be a little flexible. I am hoping that this doesn't seem too derivative of Frellywelly's Professional development, though they would definitely be in the same circle in a Venn diagram.


End file.
